BV  2775  .M3  1908 

McAfee,  Joseph  Ernest,  1870 

1947. 
Missions  striking  home 


MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 


Missions  Striking  Home 


A  Group  of  Addresses  on  a  Phase 
of    the    Missionary    Enterprise 


By      ^ 
JOSEPH  ERNEST  McAFEE 


New  York  Chicago         Toronto 

Fleming  H.  Revell  Company 

London  and  Edinburgh 


Copyright,  1908,  by 
FLEMING  H.   REVELL  COMPANY 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  80  Wabash  Avenue 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  Street,  W. 
London:  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:      100    Princes    Street 


AN  INTRODUCTORY  WORD 

There  is  no  formal  unity  among  the  sections 
of  this  little  book.  There  is  an  essential  unity, 
however,  and  the  central  idea  is  put  as  concisely 
and  as  comprehensively  as  has  been  found  pos- 
sible in  the  title.  The  day  has  happily  passed 
when  a  church  can  save  its  missionary  face  be- 
fore a  needy  world  by  an  ado  over  the  discovery 
of  **so  much  to  do  at  home."  There  will  be  a 
day,  please  God,  when  no  church  can  derive  its 
missionary  satisfaction  from  the  glamours  of  a 
distant  horizon.  The  Kingdom  will  come  some 
day  the  world  ^  round,  and  the  triumphant  home- 
liness of  the  enterprise  will  be  the  church's  su- 
preme glory. 

J.  E.  M. 

New  York  Oity, 


CONTENTS 

I.  The  Call  of  the  Homeland  ...  9 

II.  The  Spiritual  Conquest  of  the  West     .  25 

III.  The  Latest  in  the  Immigration  Business  42 

IV.  The  Gospel  for  an  Age  of  Prosperity    .  58 

V.  The  Home  Principle  in  Missions     .          .  79 

VI.  The  Reflex  of  Missions         ...  97 

VII.  The  American  "  E  Pluribus  Unum  "   of 

Grace       .         .         .         .         .         .111 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAITO* 

It  is  not  altogether  in  flippant  mood  that  I  re- 
mind you  of  the  New  Englander,  who,  upon  be- 
ing asked  by  some  greenhorn  or  wag,  ^' Where 
is  Boston?''  replied  with  severe  dignity,  not  to 
say  indignation,  '^  My  dear  sir,  I  shall  have  you 
understand  that  Boston  is  a  state  of  mind,  and 
not  a  locality  ! "  I  could  not  bring  myself  so  far 
to  belittle  the  call  of  the  Homeland,  as  to  spend 
all  our  time  prattling  of  geographical  boundaries 
and  the  limitations  of  topography.  The  United 
States  of  America  is  actually  a  section  of  the 
earth's  surface,  and  its  boundaries  are  accurately 
defined  upon  the  map.  But  the  call  of  the  Home- 
land is  not  the  appeal  of  sectionalism  ;  it  is  rather 
the  insight  upon  a  great  truth.  From  the  van- 
tage of  present  outlook,  the  Homeland  is  not  the 
residence  of  me  and  my  wife,  my  son  John  and 
his  wife,  us  four  and  no  more ;  it  is  rather  the, 
familiar  base  of  world-reaching  operations./ 
There  is  to  feel  the  thrill  of  patriotism,  a  patriot- ) 
ism  which  overflows,  and  floods  the  seas,  and 
laves  the  continents  and  islands  beyond.     There 

^  An  address  delivered  before  the  Triennial  International 
Convention  of  Young  Men's  Christian  Associations  in  Theo- 
logical Institutions  of  the  United  States  and  Canada. 

9 


10  MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 

is  to  harness  a  spiritual  world-energy  to  a  world- 
need.  There  is  to  grip  the  leverage  of  a  world 
uplift.  The  call  of  the  Homeland  is  at  once  a 
philosophy  of  salvation,  an  interpretation  and 
realization  of  the  divine  saving  efficiency,  the 
wisdom  of  God  in  adjustment  to  an  age-long  pur- 
pose, and  then  the  spring  of  divine  forces  to  a 
world-compelling  emergency.  Tortuous  rivers 
and  sinuous  coastlines,  girdling  meridians  and 
parallels  of  latitude  might  prove  but  the  en- 
tanglement of  thought.  The  final  sit-down  to  the 
problem  of  the  Homeland  will  not  be  a  study  of 
geography. 

This  is  a  big  land  of  ours  !  But  after  boasting 
is  done,  I  suppose  we  must  allow  that  it  is  not 
quite  all  outdoors.  There  are  a  lot  of  people  in 
it,  and  the  numbers  are  increasing  at  such  a  rate 
as  to  establish  a  precedent  of  world  history.  Yet 
the  total  of  to-day^  s  eighty-five  millions  is  but  a 
drop  in  the  bucket  of  the  world's  billion  and  a 
I  half.  He  who  is  out  taking  census  need  pause 
no  long  time  in  the  United  States  of  America. 
The  broad  fields  for  his  enterprise  lie  beyond 
these  bounds. 

Nor  is  the  final  cogency  of  the  appeal  re- 
vealed in  the  variety  of  soul-saving  opportunity, 
marvellous  as  is  that  variety.  One  must  needs 
travel  far  to  find  that  people  or  nationality  not 
represented  in  our  poly-psychy  population,  but 
we  doubtless  do  not  include  them  quite  all.  Our 
primitive  peoples  are  many,  and  are  esteemed  of 
great  importance  by  the  ethnologist.     But  there 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      11 

are  probably  others  on  earth  more  primitive,  and 
perhaps  some  more  entertaining  to  the  ethnolo- 
gist. The  American  negro  is  not  the  world's 
black  man.  It  is  our  social  shame  that  he  is  not 
more  black  than  he  is.  And  with  all  of  the 
magnitude  of  the  problem,  social  and  spiritual, 
which  he  creates  for  himself  and  has  been  cre- 
ated, he  is  but  a  slight  factor  in  the  world's 
dusky  composite.  With  all  the  savage  outrage 
upon  his  helpless  person,  which  constitutes  our 
national  crime,  the  hair-raising,  blood-curdling 
tragedy  of  the  sons  of  Ham  is  to  be  sought  in 
myriad -peopled  Africa,  where  Leopold,  the  prince 
ogre  of  inhuman  history,  has,  within  the  past 
twenty  years,  systematically  murdered  more  black 
men  than  all  the  negro  population  of  the  IJDited 
States.  Our  national  honour  is  blotched  with 
outrage  and  neglect,  but  the  call  of  the  Homeland 
is  not  the  shriek  of  horror. 

Nor  is  the  call  the  outcry  of  stark  need.  The 
American  plain  man  holds  in  unrestrained  per- 
sonal possession  larger  values  of  material  property 
than  any  other  the  world  over.  He  is  the  world's 
nabob.  He  eats  better  food  and  wears  better 
clothes  and  smoothes  his  way  by  easier  conveni- 
ences and  dandles  more  extravagant  luxuries  than 
any  other  mortal  who  breathes.  I  could  open  the 
door  upon  revolting  hovels  and  reeking  cellars, 
could  uncover  spectacles  of  squalor  and  sheer 
starvation  in  this  land  of  plenty  ;  but  I  will  not. 
It  is  all  horrible  enough,  but  while  famine  is  rav- 
aging whole  empires  abroad,  one  cannot  content 


12  MISSIOKS  STRIK^G  HOME 

himself  with  hearing  in  the  call  of  the  Homeland 
the  plaint  of  the  indigent  and  the  wail  of  the 
pauper. 

Nor  is  it  the  call  of  the  unchurched,  of  those 
barred  from  the  institutions  of  pure  religion.  I 
could,  if  I  might  pause,  tell  you  eye- opening  tales 
of  such  need,  of  thousands  grown  to  maturity  and 
gone  down  to  death  in  a  far  old  age,  having 
never  seen  the  inside  of  a  church,  and  not  a  few 
who  have  not  even  seen  the  outside.  But  the 
great  masses  of  the  world's  unchurched  are  not  in 
this  land.  They  must  be  sought  in  Patagonia 
and  the  mountain  fastnesses  of  Tibet.  The  tales 
are  true  of  the  shameful,  almost  shameless,  over- 
churching  of  insignificant  country  villages  here 
and  there  by  the  denominations  of  Christians 
which  you  and  I  represent.  And  I  may  suggest 
in  passing  that  if  those  which  you  represent 
would  get  out  and  leave  the  field  to  mine,  the 
disgrace  would  be  removed  at  once  and  all  would 

'^  be  lovely.  The  statistics  are  no  doubt  correct, 
which  assign  to  each  ordained  minister  in  this 
land  a  parish  of  a  few  hundred  souls,  and  to  each 
one  abroad  a  parish  of  thousands  and  hundreds 

<  of  thousands,  sometimes  millions.  The  call  of 
the  Homeland  is  not  the  call  of  churchlessness. 

Nor,  I  advance  to  say,  is  it  the  call  of  untinc- 
tured  moral  and  spiritual  destitution.  Striking 
averages  and  taking  them  by  and  large,  it  could 
doubtless  be  demonstrated  that  the  American 
people  are  among  the  cleanest  and  most  saintly 
of  the  human  race.    There  are  few  common- 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      13 

wealths  which  can  boast  a  more  complete  police 
system,  and  there  are  few  which  need  so  little 
policing.  There  are  nowhere  in  the  world  more 
conspicuous  examples  of  saintliness  and  superb 
spiritual  triumph.  Not  even  Keswick  can  outdo 
Northfield.  For  hosts  the  summers  are  one  long 
love-feast  of  spiritual  intake,  and  the  longer  win- 
ters are  for  many  souls  a  very  harvest  time  of 
good  works  and  spiritual  fruitfulness.  The  pub- 
lic conscience  never  was  dead,  and  just  now  it  is 
very  much  and  very  blessedly  alive.  It  cries  out 
lustily  against  extortion  and  greed  and  inhu- 
manity. And  it  speaks  a  sterner  language  than 
a  cry.  It  is  graciously  bringing  its  muscles  into 
play ;  it  clarions  forth  the  majestic  and  peremp- 
tory tones  of  outraged  law.  There  is  nowhere 
that  righteousness  has  grown  more  militant. 
There  is  nowhere  that  the  light  shines  more 
brightly  and  men  and  women  bathe  more  lavishly 
in  the  light. 

I  could,  if  I  chose,  cast  shadows  through  that 
path  of  light.  I  could  match  and  overmatch  this 
brightest  brightness  of  the  world's  illumination 
with  blotches  of  the  world's  blackest  blackness, 
all  of  it  right  here  in  this  land.  I  could  tell  how 
Alexander  Duff,  who  certainly  knew  the  abysses  of 
human  vice  in  vice-ridden  India,  if  any  observer 
might  be  said  to  know, — I  could  tell  how  Duff 
came  to  this  fair  land  in  1854,  and,  after  a  visit 
to  the  slums  of  Philadelphia,  left  this  testimony  j 
on  record  :   "  Anything  worse  I  have  never  seen. } 


Such  vileness,  such  debasement,  such  drunken* 


14  MISSIONS  STEIKmG  HOME 

ness,  such  beastliness,  such  unblushing  shame- 
lessness,  such  glorying  in  their  criminality,  such 
God-defying  blasphemousness,  in  short,  such 
utter  absolute  hellishness,  I  never  saw  surpassed 
in  any  land,  and  I  hope  I  never  shall.  Indeed, 
out  of  perdition,  it  is  not  conceivable  how  worse 
could  be.''  I  often  comfort  others  and  even  seek 
to  comfort  myself  at  times  with  the  reminder  that 
that  testimony  is  dated  1854.  But  there  come 
moments  of  the  full  shock  of  present  revelations. 
I  tremble  under  the  conviction  that  I  might  lead 
you  by  the  hand  this  very  night,  and  show  you 
here  and  there  in  sections  of  our  large  cities,  what 
would  wring  from  the  most  travelled  of  you  simi- 
lar testimony  to  that  of  the  much  travelled  and 
ever-observant  Duff  in  1854.  It  might  not  be 
unreasonable  to  affirm  that  some  of  the  black 
spots  in  this  bright  land  are  the  blackest  in  the 
moral  universe  outside  of  hell  itself.  I  could  tell 
tales  of  unrestrained,  savage  rapacity  suffered  by 
the  neglected  and  outraged  of  this  God-favoured 
land,  the  Indian,  the  Eskimo,  the  ISTegro,  the 
under-dog  in  the  inhuman  conflict  here  and  there 
and  many  wheres.  Such  facts  are  not  negligible ; 
I  simply  do  not  press  them  as  the  unrelated 
quantities  of  the  final  equation.  Slums  and  rav- 
ished tribes  and  imprisoned  souls  in  whatever 
numbers,  few  or  many,  must  count  in  the  rough- 
est reckoning  of  human  need.  I  ask  you  to  pass, 
however,  to  calculations  too  refined  for  mere  nu- 
merical ratios  and  comparisons.  Counting  noses 
or  scratching  at  plastered  sores  or  searching  out 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      15 

black  spots  in  the  field  of  light,  is  not  the  process 
by  which  a  great  spiritual  world  crisis  is  to  be 
met. 

I  wish  you  to  believe  that  the  call  of  the  Home- 
land expresses  itself  in  universal  terms  and 
sounds  out  an  age-compelling  demand.  That  call 
is  this : 

First,  the  appeal  to  a  yearning,  heart- wrench- 
ing passion  against  sin  and  for  sinners  at  close 
quarters.  It  is  the  immediate  tug  of  sinning  hu- 
manity's need.  It  is  sallying  forth  in  search  of 
the  Holy  Grail  and  reining  up  the  steed  at  the 
plaint  of  the  beggar  crouching  at  the  palace  gate. 
It  is  the  plain  putting  of  the  question,  Do  I  care  ? 
have  I  the  sense  of  brotherhood  which  will  set 
me  to  brothering  my  own  brothers'?  There  is  a 
ring  of  sincerity  and  the  peal  of  immediate  reality 
in  the  call  of  the  Homeland.  The  true  Saviour- 
man  cares ;  not  theoretically,  not  distantly,  not 
professionally,  but  actually,  vitally,  through  the 
immediate  impact  of  need  and  with  an  immediate 
outrush  of  love.  He  that  loveth  not  his  brother 
whom  he  hath  seen, — what  warrant  is  there  for 
concluding  he  will  discover  a  love  for  those 
whom  he  hath  not  seen?  Love  does  not  resort 
to  the  multiplication  table  to  calculate  its  re- 
sponses. The  man  who  cares  is  not  careful  to 
count  noses  in  estimate  of  how  much  he  cares. 
The  true  heart  is  not  pried  open  by  the  leverage 
of  multitudes.  A  soul-yearning  is  not  fed  upon 
columns  of  figures  and  mathematical  demonstra- 
tions, or,  if  it  is,  it  is  a  miserable  starveling. 


/ 


16  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

j  Jesus  Christ,  the  Saviour  of  men,  did  not  know 
I  how  many  men  there  were  in  the  world  to  be 
1  saved.     Mathematics,  I  venture  to  believe,  was 
f  the  least  of  His  accomplishments.    He  came  to 
save  men  not  because  they  were  so  many,  but 
/  because  they  were  so  dear.    He  yearned  after  the 
men  He  knew,  not  those  represented  by  Arabic 
figures  in  columns  of  statistics.     It  does  not  alter 
the  inwardness  of  the  case,  though  we  must  be- 
lieve that  He  drew  upon  omniscience  to  build  up 
I  His  statistical  tables.     In  no  case  did  omniscience 
/  make  the  Man  of  Galilee  the  Saviour  of  men.     It 
was    rather    the    human- divine   yearning  of  a 
divine-human  soul,  so  great  that  it  could  con- 
sciously include  all  men  through  a  direct  ministry 
of  life  and  of  death  to  men  whom  He  could  reach 
forth  and  touch. 

You  will  not  misunderstand  what  I  am  saying. 
I  believe  with  all  my  heart  in  the  romance  of 
missions.  Eobbed  of  its  divine  romance  the  mis- 
sionary enterprise  would  be  too  insipid  a  pastime 
to  hold  for  a  day  a  man  with  red  blood  tingling 
in  his  veins  and  a  backbone  to  furnish  the  current 
for  zeal  thrills.  There  is  naught  on  earth  or  in 
heaven  so  romantic  as  the  mission  of  redemption 
flung  afar.  But  I  dare  speak  up  for  any  one  of 
the  Foreign  Mission  Boards  of  our  several  de- 
nominations to  say  that  the  man  who  applies  for 
work  in  distant  lands  because  he  has  found  the 
spiritually  impoverished  at  home  not  sufficiently 
interesting, — I  venture  to  tell  such  applicant  for 
foreign  work  what  he  will  be  told  officially,  and 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      17 

perhaps  not  over  politely,  that  he  is  not  wanted. 
The  Homeland  calls  for  a  yearning  for  the  broth- 
ers for  whom  Christ  died,  where  those  brothers 
live  and  by  the  immediate  outrush  of  that  yearn- 
ing. Our  whole  missionary  enterprise  greatly 
needs  the  heeding  of  that  call. 

And  shall  we  not  calculate  the  world's  needy 
multitudes  1    Oh,  aye !    Count  them  to  the  last 
chick  and  child,  and  announce  them  all  to  yearn- 
ing men,  that  all  may  know  and  feel.     But  away 
with  your  figures  in  the  definition  of  the  soul  pas- 
sion !    There  can  be  no  definition  of  soul  passion ; 
love  is — I  do  not  say,  unlimited  j  I  call  it  illimit- 
able.    Your  calculations  do  not  calculate.     Shall 
not  men  go  to  the  uttermost  parts  to  minister  to 
the  needy  of  the  soul-saving  truth?    Oh,  aye, 
aye !    Eun,  you    men  who  are  to  run ;  run  so 
eagerly  that  winged  ships  cannot  carry  you  fast 
enough  and  the  utmost  conveyance  of  man's  in- 
ventive arts  cannot  carry  you  far  enough.     But 
do  not  go  because  American  sin  is  not  sufficiently 
picturesque.     And  if  you  go  fleeing  from  Ameri- 
can spiritual  deadness,  then  is  your  mission  much  ,^ 
that  of  a  cowardly  flight.     Do  not  go  where  more  / 
souls  can  be  saved  because  there  are  more  to  pick  f 
and  choose  from,  where  more  culls  can  be  thrown  ; 
away  without  feeling  the  loss.     Before  you  go  any-  '{ 
whither  learn  more  than  that  of  the  genius  of  the 
soul  passion  and  of  the  soul  need. 

Thus  much  for  the  expression  of  the  saving 
passion.  There  is  to  note  the  expression  of  the 
saving  purpose. 


,       18  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

The  clearer  meaning  of  what  I  have  said,  and 
in  no  sense  the  contradiction,  may  appear  in 
what  I  nominate  next  as  the  call  of  the  Home- 
land. I  say,  secondly,  it  presses  for  a  true  and 
vital  definition  of  God's  salvation.  Is  this  land 
j  evangelized  ?  If  it  is,  then  there  is  a  bold, 
/abysmal  difference  between  evangelization  and 

//  salvation  j  for  this  is  not  a  saved  land.  This  is 
1  jnot  a  saved  land  ;  God  forgive  us  the  travesty 
upon  His  saving  grace  involved  in  the  supposi- 
tion that  it  is.  Evangelization  and  salvation  are 
two  different  words,  and  they  stand  for  two  dif- 
ferent ideas  t  Very  well,  so  they  do,  then  ;  and 
the  true  Saviour-man  should  have  no  doubt  of  it, 
nor  doubt  which  is  the  true  goal  of  the  saving 
process. 

With  complete  cogency  it  may  be  insisted  that 
it  is  man's  business  to  evangelize,  and  that  it  is 
not  within  his  power  or  prerogative  to  save.  If 
there  is  any  one  in  aU  this  company  who  is  about 
setting  forth  to  save  men,  he  may  well  bethink 
himself  at  once  of  his  folly.  You  cannot  save 
-^  men  ;  God  saves  men.  But  now  that  the  distinc- 
tion is  made  and  insisted  upon,  we  have  got  no 
great  distance  towards  any  truth  of  immediate 
importance.  Man  cannot  save ;  but  God  can, — 
and  He  means  to.  And  I  make  bold  further  to 
say  that  it  is  our  business  so  to  evangelize  that 
His  intention  shall  be  realized.  If  we  are  hiding 
behind  our  definitions  of  evangelization  to  con- 
ceal and  justify  our  lame  putting  of  God's  saving 
message,  then  we  are  reduced  to  an  ignoble  shift 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      19 

indeed.  The  God  who  can  save  men,  and  can 
make  them  willing  in  the  day  of  His  power,  only 
awaits  the  ministry  of  His  evangelists  to  usher  in 
that  day  of  power.  I  submit  that  we  have  not 
shown  ourselves  such  evangelists ;  we  have  not 
done  our  part.  We  have  not  done  it  here  where 
a  longsuffering  God  has  given  us  our  best  chance. 
I  submit  further,  that  we  do  not  know  how.  I 
submit  again,  that  we  would  best  learn  how,  that 
the  coming  of  the  kingdom  waits  upon  our  learn- 
ing. I  submit  finally,  that  here  is  where  that 
knowledge  is  to  be  best  gained,  and  the  demon- 
stration made. 

We  contend  with  much  vehemence  that  men 
are  saved  one  by  one,  that  the  saving  ministry 
reaches  this  man  and  this  man ;  and  the  conten- 
tion is  of  obvious  cogency.  Men  are  not  saved  in' 
lumps  and  masses,  nor  by  townfuls  and  city-i 
blockfuls.  Charlemagne's  soldiers,  in  their  zeal 
for  the  propagation  of  the  faith,  are  said  to  have 
driven  the  barbarians  into  pens,  where,  from  the 
lofty  vantage  of  the  stockade,  they  dashed  water 
over  the  bewildered  hordes  by  the  bucketful,  and 
then  reckoned  them  baptized  into  the  saving 
faith.  We  sprinkling  Presbyterians  must  com- 
mend their  orthodox  mode  of  baptism.  But  their 
psychology  was  distressingly  erroneous,  and  their 
spiritual  appreciations  were  hardly  short  of 
blasphemous.  Men  are  not  saved  by  the  herd 
and  they  ought  not  to  be  baptized  so.  But  with 
all  the  truth  of  that  truth  it  is  no  less  true  that 
none  ever  saves  a  stark,  individual  man,  not 


20  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

even  God  Himself.  He  does  not  make  such  in 
the  first  place  to  be  the  subjects  of  such  a  salva- 
tion. No  man  lives  to  himself  in  any  capacity  of 
life,  and  in  aught  so  vital  as  his  soul^s  salvation, 
it  is  not  possible  that  he  should  be  saved  to  him- 
self. 

There  is  to  learn  this  age-compelling  lesson  : 
that  in  our  saving  ministry  we  are  dealing  with 
a  vast  spiritual  organism.  It  is  a  lesson  utterly 
bewildering  to  some  of  our  theories  of  missionary 
enterprise,  but  it  is  a  truth  which  our  compli- 
cated, congested  life  is  forcing  upon  the  attention 
of  the  thoughtful.  And  because  it  is  such  an 
eternal  truth,  it  is  true  not  alone  for  the  mission 
to  the  Homeland,  but  at  last  for  that  to  every 
land.  It  is  a  world-lesson  the  Homeland  is 
teaching  us.  Here  in  our  crowding,  jostling  pop- 
ulation we  have  not  a  mass  of  disjecta  membra 
from  which  we  may  with  more  or  less  eagerness 
snatch  out  singular  fragments  here  and  there,  and 
congratulate  ourselves  upon  the  salvage.  We 
have  here  rather  a  spiritual  organism,  and  as 
such  our  land  needs  saving,  and  only  as  such 
will  it  finally  be  saved.  It  needs  not  a  half  sav- 
ing, a  partial  saving,  a  smattery  saving,  not  a 
helter-skelter,  hit-and-miss  saving  ;  but  a  saving, 
a  setting  up  of  the  spiritual  kingdom  of  God.  I 
face  the  implications  of  such  a  pronouncement, 
and  I  hope  you  do  also,  though  there  is  danger 
of  their  being  misunderstood.  There  is  not  the 
time  to  elaborate  and  discuss  those  implications. 
I  only  presume  to  say  now  that  the  saving  mis- 


THE  CALL  OF  THE  HOMELAND      21 

sion  in  the  Homeland  is  graciously  forcing  us 
into  a  truer  definition  of  God's  salvation.  It  is 
teaching  us  what  it  means  to  be  saved.  We  are 
learning  how  insufficient  in  the  final  demonstra- 
tion is  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilderness,  and  how 
vital  is  a  persistent  Christ-life  lived  among  men. 
The  final  message  of  salvation  is  not  a  proclama- 
tion, but  a  life. 

The  third  heaven-sent  call  of  the  Homeland  is 
the  appeal  of  world-capturing  spiritual  strategy. 
This  vast  spiritual  organism  is  masterful,  and  is 
designed  to  be  used  masterfully  of  the  Divine 
Strategist.  A  saved  America  holds  the  key  to 
the  world's  saving.  Eight  here,  from  this  or- 
ganism of  moral  and  social  forces,  projects  the 
mightiest  spiritual  leverage  at  the  hand  of  God 
or  man  for  the  uplift  of  the  human  race  towards 
God  and  heaven. 

There  is  a  fallacy  which  ought  not  to  be  far  to 
seek,  in  the  contention  that  the  sending  upon  a 
foreign  mission  necessarily  reacts  to  the  saving 
of  the  sender.  It  does  not  necessarily,  because  it 
frequently  has  not  actually.  Her  foreign  mission 
did  not  save  Christian  Africa  of  the  early  cen- 
turies J  hers  did  not  save  Syria ;  hers  did  not  save 
Eome.  It  is  a  begging  of  the  question  to  protest 
that  these  did  not  prosecute  their  foreign  mission 
with  sufficient  vigour  and  purity  of  motive.  Of 
course  they  did  not.  A  true-motived  foreign 
mission  reacts  as  a  powerful  saving  factor,  adding 
grace  to  grace.  But  precisely  in  that  adjective 
lies  the  point  of  insistence.    The  profound  truth 


22  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

/for  all  our  missionary  enterprise  near  or  far  is 
that  the  saving  mission  is  and  can  only  be  the 
\  welling  forth  of  the  saved  life.  The  unsaved 
i  man  cannot  be  a  true  saviour,  and  the  impact  of 
I  the  unsaved  spiritual  organism,  such  as  is  this 
I  land  of  ours,  cannot  in  the  truest  sense  be  that  of 
i  a  saving  power.  Unsaved  America  must  remain 
\    at  best  a  lame  foreign  missionary  agent. 

The  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  has  not  its  grip 
/  upon  the  spiritual  forces  of  this  masterful  spir- 
/  itual  organism  of  our  American  life.     And  it 
[  ought  to  have.     By  God's  grace  it  is  going  to 
have !    The  Church  does  not  and  cannot  now 
direct  those  forces  in  its  world-conquest  of  grace. 
In    many  places  one  half   of  its  energies  are 
wasted,  and  worse  than  wasted  in  combating  the 
very  forces  of  our  Americanism  which  ought  to 
be    its   most  potent  instrument  of    aggression. 
Nay,   more,  the  Church  is  encountering  an  in- 
creasingly strenuous  struggle  for  its  own  exis- 
tence in  broad  sections  of  our  own  land.     Its 
j  work  abroad  is  being  undone  by  its  shortcoming 
;  at  home ;  and  in  some  sections  of  our  own  Amer- 
ican life  its  existence  in  the  community  is  simply 
a  negligible  factor,  or  next  to  it.     And  what  is 
the  demand  of  the  hour  ?    Not  a  policy  of  for- 
eign missions,  nor  of  home  missions,   not  any- 
thing content  barely  to  express  itself  in  the  terms 
of  a  policy.     The  Church  needs  the  spirit  which 
inspires    all  wholesome    missions    and  without 
which  any  mission  must  at  last  be  a  failure. 
The  Church  needs  for  its  mission  of  salvation 


THE  CALL  OP  THE  HOMELAND      23 

itself  a  saved  life.  It  needs  first  to  know  what  it 
means  to  be  saved  and  then  the  courage  to  be 
that. 

The  call  of  the  Homeland  is  therefore  to  God's 
prophets  of  this  latter  day,  whose  souls  burn  with 
the  conviction  that  God  can  save  and  means  to 
save  this  vast  spiritual  organism  ;  who  are  will- 
ing to  accept  the  divine  commission  to  marshall 
the  forces  of  our  society  in  a  triumphant  spiritual 
conquest ;  who  believe  that  the  Church,  the  or- 
ganized agency  of  spiritual  aggression,  can  cap- 
ture these  forces,  and  ought  so  to  capture,  re- 
maining not  less  the  spiritual  agency  it  ought  to 
be  ;  men  who  scorn  to  allow  that  a  pure  Church 
can  dwell  complacently  in  a  rotten  social  order ; 
who  cannot  imagine  that  a  Church  has  any  busi- 
ness slopping  through  its  own  reek  in  a  slovenly 
ministry  to  the  world's  cleansing  ;  who  are  them- 
selves so  charged  with  spiritual  forcefulness  that 
they  can  spiritualize  a  grossly  material  civiliza- 
tion and  convert  it  into  the  instrument  of  spir- 
itual uplift  for  the  world  ;  who  believe  so  whole- 
heartedly in  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ,  that 
they  will  shape  its  ministry  into  a  power  vitaliz- 
ing all  our  life. 

Prophets!  Prophets!  Prophets!  God  calls 
aloud  to  His  prophets  to  whom  He  may  reveal 
the  way  out,  and  whom  He  may  commission  to 
lead  the  way  on. 

This  is  not  the  time  for  the  division  of  field,  to 
set  the  claims  or  attractions  of  one  phase  of  a 
world-need  over  against  another.     This  is  a  time 


24  MISSIONS  STEIKIKG  HOME 

y  to  hearken  to  the  call  of  God,  each  for  himself. 
The  call  of  the  Homeland  is  not  for  some  men ; 
theirs  must  be  the  call  of  the  farland.  The  virtue 
of  any  does  not  lie  in  whither  he  goes,  but  only 
in  his  going  where  he  ought  to  go.  If  any  had 
expected  me  to  set  forth  in  severalty  the  appeal 
^  of  the  Indian,   the  Eskimo,    the  Mexican,  the 

Morman,  the  mountaineer,  the  neglected  of  any 
rank,  he  has  of  course  been  sorely  disappointed. 
You  must  know  that  these  importunate  appeals 
have  not  been  out  of  mind  for  a  moment.  They 
are  all  merged  in  the  one  deep-toned  call  to  the 
capture  of  the  stupendous  forces  of  our  Ameri- 
can life,  the  mightiest  spiritual  organism  in  God's 
world. 

Such  a  prophet  an  awakening  Church  is  ready 
to  follow.  The  Church  is  awakening,  is  shaking 
itself  out  of  its  torpor.  The  signs  are  gloriously 
unmistakable.  There  is  a  ministry  awaiting  the 
prophet  of  to-day  such  as  an  Isaiah  or  a  Daniel 
might  passionately  covet.  The  Church  of  Christ 
waits  to  follow,  the  forces  of  American  life  wait 
to  yield,  God  waits  to  commission  the  prophet  of 
to-day  to  a  world-embracing  ministry  to  the 
Homeland. 


n 

THE  SPIRITUAL  CONQUEST  OF 
THE  WEST 

The  story  of  the  West  is  not  the  tale  of  desti- } 
tution.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  story  of  abound- 
ing material  opportunity.  I  have  recently  re-' 
turned  from  a  journey  through  broad  sections  of 
the  West.  I  fear  I  have  caught  the  fever.  How 
a  Westerner  can  lie  !  To  those  who  have  never 
seen  with  their  own  eyes  and  felt  the  tug  in  their 
own  consciousness  of  the  passion  of  things,  the 
Westerner  appears  to  lose  his  conscience  when  he 
opens  his  mouth  to  tell  the  story  of  his  land  of 
marvels.  Once  having  seen  it  is  difi&cult  to  resist 
the  passion.  I  must  confess  to  have  seen, — have 
laid  my  own  eyes  on  the  trees  of  the  forest  which 
require  a  man  and  a  boy  to  see  the  top ;  the 
orchards  where  big  red  pumpkins  grow  on  the 
apple  trees ;  the  ranches  of  such  grand  propor- 
tions that  the  husbandman  sets  out  with  his  plow 
in  the  spring  and  turns  about  by  autumn  to 
harvest  back  along  his  furrow.  A  few  weeks 
ago  when  I  was  being  presented  to  an  audience 
in  the  far  Northwest,  the  chairman  of  the  even- 
ing turned  to  urge  that  I  do  not  fail  to  bring 
back  to  the  East  the  tale  of  the  West^s  destitu- 
tion.    He  charged  me  particularly  to  say  that 

25 


26  MISSIONS  STEIEING  HOME 

the  labourer  receives  a  wage  of  but  four  dollars 
per  day,  that  fruit  land  thereabouts  was  selling 
at  the  mere  pittance  of  eighteen  hundred  dollars 
per  acre,  that  an  apple  grower  of  the  region  had 
shipped  abroad  his  crop  of  a  particular  species  of 
the  fruit  and  could  secure  but  eight  dollars  per 
bushel-box  for  his  entire  crop  of  four  hundred 
boxes. 

A  few  days  thereafter  I  was  sitting  at  the  table 
of  an  amiable  host  when  he  casually  read  aloud 
a  paragraph  from  the  daily  paper  to  the  effect 
that  ranchman  So-and-So  had  that  week  hauled 
in  his  season's  crop  of  wheat,  and  had  been  paid 
in  a  check  of  $70,869.17.  I  asked  my  host  how 
much  of  that  amount  he  supposed  was  net  profit. 
He  drew  his  pencil  from  his  pocket,  figured  a 
moment  on  the  margin  of  the  newspaper,  and 
finally  replied,  **0h,  I  suppose,  about  half.'' 
The  railroads  are  now  rounding  up  the  rolling 
stock  required  to  haul  out  the  31,000  carloads  of 
oranges  constituting  the  surplus  crop  of  the  ex- 
treme Southwest  this  season.  I  could  not  muster 
the  conscience,  nor  could  I  any  more  the  desire 
to  tell  the  story  of  the  West  in  a  lament  of  ma- 
terial destitution  and  distress.  There  is  not  a 
state  west  of  the  Mississippi  Kiver  which  is  not 
the  biggest  thing  out  in  its  line.  Each  of  them 
is  setting  the  standard  for  the  world  and  all  time 
in  the  development  of  some  money-producing 
enterprise.  That  season  is  accounted  lost  in 
which  some  record  is  not  broken.  Now,  it  is 
wheat,  the  biggest  crop  which  ever  was,  or  again, 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  27 

it  is  corn,  or  alfalfa,  or  copper,  or  petroleum,  or 
dried  prunes,  or  sugar  beets,  or  oranges,  or  gas, 
or  lien's  eggs,  or  canned  salmon,  or  pine  logs,  or 
grapes, — or  gold,  plain,  undiluted  gold.  But, 
whatever  it  is,  it  speedily  coins  up  into  gold,  and 
it  heralds  the  West  as  the  Eldorado  of  the  fortune- 
seeker  since  the  beginning  of  time.  Do  not  put 
yourself  to  the  pains  of  questioning  any  of  the 
stories  you  may  hear.  They  may  not  be  exact  in 
all  details,  but  they  cannot  be  fabulous  enough 
to  miss  the  truth  far. 

Now  that  I  am  set  agoing  allow  me  to  run  on 
a  moment  still.  Some  have  expressed  alarm  lest 
our  territory  should  on  account  of  immigration 
and  from  other  causes  become  overcrowded.  If  ! 
we  might  only  calm  ourselves  !  We  have  only  be- 
gun to  occupy  our  territory.  Eemember  that,  \ 
including  Alaska,  five-sevenths  of  the  superficial 
area  of  our  country  lies  west  of  the  Mississippi 
Eiver,  and  that  as  yet  but  a  scattering  twenty- 
two  or  twenty-five  millions  of  people  reside  in  all 
that  vast  expanse.  Great  tracts  which  it  is  now 
reasonable  to  conclude  will  some  day  support 
immense  populations  have  not  even  been  sur- 
veyed nor  yet  explored.  Oregon  with  its  chief 
city  of  200,000  people  and  other  cities  coming  on 
by  leaps  and  bounds,  is  still  peopled  only  in 
narrow  fringes,  along  one  side  and  one  end  and 
a  part  of  the  other  end.  Its  area  is  almost  ex- 
actly twice  that  of  the  state  of  New  York.  Far 
the  most  of  it  is  practically  void  of  population, 
only  waiting  for  railroad  extension  and  develop- 


28        missio:n^s  steiking  home 

ment.  You  have  probably  often  noted  those  two 
black  dots  on  the  map  made  to  represent  respec- 
tively the  cities  of  San  Francisco  and  Portland, 
and  you  may  have  wondered,  since  they  appear 
to  lie  so  close  together  on  the  ragged  edge  of  the 
continent,  whether  the  trolley-service  between 
them  is  half-hourly  or  every  fifteen  minutes. 
Allow  me  to  assure  you  that  it  required  thirty- 
six  hours  for  some  of  the  most  powerful  steam 
locomotives  ever  constructed  to  haul  me  from 
one  city  to  the  other.  Not  that  the  train  was 
run  for  my  special  benefit,  you  understand ;  the 
conductor  and  several  others  were  along  at  the 
time.  The  point  is  that  thirty-six  hours  were 
consumed  in  the  passage,  the  time  allowed  for 
the  journey  between  New  York  and  Kansas  City. 
It  is  true,  to  be  sure,  that  the  Southern  Pacific 
Railway  does  not  move  with  the  celerity  of  the 
Pennsylvania  and  the  Burlington,  yet  the  actual 
distance  in  miles  would  carry  one  from  New  York 
well  out  into  Indiana. 

When  I  awoke  in  the  morning  we  were  de- 
scending the  mountain  gorge  of  the  Sacramento 
River  into  the  Sacramento  Valley,  a  part  of  the 
vast  level  plain  lying  in  the  midst  of  the  state  of 
California,  of  an  extent,  in  itself,  equal  to  the 
territory  of  the  state  of  Pennsylvania,  and  lying 
as  level  as  a  floor.  The  day  long  as  the  train 
sped  on  the  straight  track  down  the  valley  my 
athletic  soul  was  grieved  within  me  at  the  spec- 
tacle of  so  much  good  baseball  ground  going  to 
waste.    An  imperial  territory  lying  in  the  lap  of 


CONQUEST  OP  THE  WEST  29 

the  mountains.  Vastly  fertile.  From  the  car 
windows  there  were  to  be  seen  a  few  of  the  pres- 
ent products,  wheat,  alfalfa,  prunes,  almonds, 
olives,  peaches,  some  oranges  and  lemons,  almost 
anything  else  one  might  choose  to  name.  And 
so  few  people  as  yet  that  they  seemed  positively 
lonesome.  A  pocket  of  soil,  as  pockets  go  in 
the  West,  into  which  the  present  seven  millions 
of  Pennsylvania  might  creep  and  produce  the 
substance  to  support  ten  times  their  number,  and 
then  be  left  idle  to  pine  for  relief  from  their 
ennui. 

As  I  rode  down  the  valley  I  was  conscious  that  | 
towards  the  right  beyond  and  among  the  moun- 
tains there  stands  to-day  upon  the  stumps  in  the 
forest  in  two  or  three  counties  of  northern  Cali- 
fornia enough  lumber  to  permit  the  hauling  out 
of  500  carloads  each  week  for  the  next  150  years.  ' 
Two  different  lumber  companies  announce  each 
of  them  that  it  holds  already  the  stumpage  rights 
upon  sufficient  timber  land  to  enable  it  to  cut  out 
200,000  or  300,000  feet  of  lumber  each  day  for 
fifty  years.     Further  north,  accessible  from  the  j 
Tillamook  Bay  in  Oregon,  there  are  said  to  be  ^ 
seven  and  a  quarter  billions  of  feet  of  lumber  still 
uncut.     That  was  to  wave  my  right  hand  at. 

On  the  left,  beyond  the  Sierra  Kevadas,  lay 
the  territory  which  the  Synod  of  California  of 
the  Presbyterian  Church,  to  whose  meeting  I  was 
then  hastening,  was  soon  to  erect  into  a  separate 
Presbytery.  Theretofore  it  had  been  embraced 
in  the  territory  of  a  Presbytery  of  still  greater 


30  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

expanse.  Later  I  stood  in  the  group  of  keen- 
eyed,  sturdy  young  ministers  who  with  their 
churches  constitute  the  new  Presbytery,  and 
hearkened  while  they  settled  upon  the  location 
of  the  first  meeting.  When  the  most  advanta- 
geous point  had  been  decided  upon  it  transpired 
that  the  nearest  minister  must  travel  300  miles 
to  attend  the  meeting,  and  for  those  farthest 
away  the  journey  was  seven  and  eight  hundred 
miles  ;  the  expense  of  which,  it  is  fair  to  note  in 
passing,  is  met  by  the  men  themselves  out  of 
their  exceedingly  skimp  salaries. 

And  the  territory  embraced  in  that  Presby- 
tery,— if  you  will  drop  in  at  the  next  railroad 
ticket  office  you  may  happen  to  pass,  and  secure 
the  folder  of  the  new  Tonopah  and  Goldfield 
Railroad  Company,  you  will  learn  something  of 
the  character  and  prospects  of  that  section.  Laud- 
boomers'  stories  are  rarely  prosy,  and  certainly 
there  is  nothing  prosy  in  this  folder  to  which  I 
refer,  but  it  would  be  impossible  to  make  the 
story  of  Nevada's  recent  development  tame. 
Cities  of  three  and  four  and  seven  thousand 
inhabitants  on  sites  which  only  a  few  years  or 
even  months  ago  were  as  bare  as  the  palm  of 
your  hand.  These  are  not  ramshackle  mining 
camps,  which,  like  the  grass  of  the  field,  to-day 
are  and  to-morrow  are  abandoned  to  the  flames. 
They  are  at  an  inconceivable  pace  assuming  the 
permanence  of  cities.  Even  the  wilderness  is 
rapidly  coming  into  its  own.  The  consciousness 
is  dawning  upon  the  thoughtful  that  the  great 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  31 

American  desert  is  in  fact  the  great  American 
treasure-house.  There  is  inconceivable  mineral 
treasure  through  the  most  of  our  desert  domain. 

Yet  even  that  is  telling  but  a  slight  portion  of 
the  full  tale.  The  notion  still  prevails  in  some 
quarters  that  the  most  of  the  vast  tracts  of  terri- 
tory still  unoccupied  is  hopeless  desert.  There  is 
to  assure  all  that  no  part  of  our  domain  is  waste 
henceforth.  The  stupendous  irrigation  enter- 
prises of  the  government  and  private  capital  are 
seeing  to  that.  Even  for  those  tracts  which  can- 
not ever  be  reached  by  the  floods  of  the  irrigators, 
some  Secretary  Wilson  or  a  Luther  Burbank  will 
develop  a  forage  grass  which  will  thrive  even 
upon  an  ash  heap,  and  will  cover  the  wastes  with 
such  herds  of  cattle  as  shall  turn  the  Beef  Trust 
green  with  envy.  And  those  tracts  standing  so 
straight  up  and  down  that  they  are  profitless, 
either  for  irrigated  crops  or  for  range  land,  are 
still  worth  all  they  cost  for  scenery.  There  is  no 
grander  in  the  world.  There  is  no  portion  of  our 
vast  domain  hopelessly  waste,  and  our  science, 
though  still  lame  enough  in  the  handling  of  the 
problems  of  advanced  agriculture,  has  yet  con- 
verted this  hollow  of  the  desert  into  the  garden 
spot  of  the  nation.  A  short  memory  carries  one 
back  to  the  time  when  the  sages  united  in  affirming 
that  only  a  narrow  strip  on  the  eastern  boundary 
of  Kansas  would  ever  be  available  for  the  pur- 
poses of  agriculture.  Yet  the  other  day  as  I  rode 
into  the  extreme  western  portion  of  that  state,  I 
beheld  from  the  car  window  a  million-and-a-half- 


32  MISSIO:^S  STRIKING  HOME 

dollar  beet  sugar  refinery  erected  during  the  past 
year  or  two.  At  one  of  the  small  stations  along  the 
road  I  counted  thirty-one  beet  sugar  wagons,  each 
carrying  from  two  to  four  tons  of  beets,  drawn 
up  in  line  waiting  to  load  the  cars  for  that  re- 
finery. The  same  spectacle  was  duplicated  at 
other  small  towns  along  the  way.  The  orange 
you  ate  at  breakfast  this  morning  probably  was 
grown  upon  land  which  only  a  few  years  ago  was 
pronounced  as  hopeless  for  the  husbandman  as 
Sahara  itself.  No  section  of  the  great  West  need 
remain  permanently  waste. 

The  West  is  not  destitute  and  cannot  in  any 
human  reasonableness  become  so.  Wall  Street 
may  raise  flurries  and  then  new  flurries  and  do 
its  worst,  and  the  West  must  suffer,  of  course, 
along  with  the  rest  of  the  country.  But  sub- 
stantially the  West  will  continue  to  be  prosper- 
ous and,  increasing  every  day  in  wealth,  will  in- 
sure the  wealth  of  the  nation  while  generations 
come  and  go. 

But,  now,  have  I  not  spoiled  the  missionary 
appeal  f  Have  I  not  said  too  much  T  Some  will 
wonder  how  a  land  so  represented  can  be  set  forth 
in  the  call  to  missionary  activity.  In  the  con- 
ception of  many,  perhaps,  it  is  only  the  physically 
destitute  who  can  be  regarded  as  the  fit  objects 
of  missionary  solicitude.  Then  indeed  must  the 
West  prove  distressingly  uninviting  as  a  mission- 
I  ary  field.  There  are  numerous  populous  cities 
in  the  West,  and  some — shame  on  them  ! — already 
know  somewhat  of  the  slum,  but  if  you  seek  the 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  33 

slum  at  its  sluinmiest  you  must  seek  it  in  the 
East.  In  the  refined  art  of  slum-making,  the 
West  is  as  yet  backward.  Please  God  !  may  it 
never  learn  fully  that  art !  There  is  probably  no 
more  difacult  or  needy  missionary  field  on  the 
globe  than  Alaska,  but  it  is  hazardous  to  men- 
tion in  some  missionary  presence  the  twenty-one 
millions  of  gold  coming  out  each  year.  The 
fabulous  resources  of  mining  and  lumbering  in- 
terests may  not  be  becomingly  mentioned  in  con- 
nection with  the  missionary  appeal.  A  single 
tale  of  physical  destitution  and  squalor,  which 
certain  localities  in  Alaska  abundantly  justify, 
will  sometimes  call  out  a  fuller  missionary  re- 
sponse than  might  a  cyclopedic  recital  of  the  vast 
opportunities  of  grace  in  a  vast  continent. 

Again,  if  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  shall  con- 
ceive itself  as  committed  only  to  the  task  of  pluck- 
ing brands  from  the  burning,  then  were  it  wiser 
far  to  pass  the  West  by  and  hasten  whither  there 
are  vastly  larger  numbers  of  brands  to  be  plucked. 
There  are  at  the  most  but  a  paltry  twenty-two  or 
twenty-five  millions,  in  all  the  vast  bound  west 
of  the  Mississippi  Eiver.  If  the  problems  of  sal- 
vation are  simple  matters  of  arithmetical  addition 
and  subtraction,  then  does  the  West  present  no 
inviting  field  to  missionary  ambition,  for  the 
numbers  to  conjure  with  are  small. 

But  if  the  Church  of  Jesus  Christ  conceives 
itself  as  committed  to  the  charge  of  setting  up 
of  the  kingdom  of  God  here  in  God's  world,  the 
bringing  of  the  kingdoms  of  this  world  under  the 


34  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

sway  of  God  and  of  His  Christ,  the  pouring  of  the 
vivifying  life  of  the  Son  of  God,  the  Saviour  of 
men,  into  the  life  of  the  great  human  brotherhood 
the  world  ^ round,  the  giving  back  to  the  redeeming 
Christ  the  satisfaction  of  His  soul  travail  in  the 
redemption  of  men  to  God, — if  the  Church  con- 
ceives itself  as  committed  to  anything  like  that 
programme,  then  is  the  five-sevenths  of  the 
United  States  lying  west  of  the  Mississippi  Eiver 
the  very  campaign-ground  of  the  world's  spir- 
itual conquest.  If  the  Church  aspires  to  shape 
the  forces  which  are  to  control  the  spiritual  des- 
tinies of  this  new  century,  why,  out  there  is 
where  they  are  forming,  and  there  must  the 
Church  bend  her  energies.  If  the  Church  means 
to  mould  with  the  divine  potencies  the  civiliza- 
tion of  the  continents,  why,  out  there  is  the 
moulding  trough  and  there  must  she  thrust  in 
her  hand.  If  the  Church  would  touch  the  very 
nerve-centre  of  the  new-world  spiritual  organism, 
she  must  reach  out  there.  If  the  Church  really 
understands  the  genius  of  the  kingdom  of  God 
among  men,  then,  depend  upon  it,  she  will  not 
mistake  the  importance  of  this  ever-expanding 
ministry. 

Does  any  one  doubt  for  a  moment  the  validity 
of  the  prophecies,  not  to  mention  the  accomplished 
verities,  just  proclaimed?  Does  any  doubt  the 
importance  of  our  Western  domain  in  the  shaping 
of  the  spiritual  destinies  of  the  human  race  ?  The 
children  in  our  schoolrooms  understand  that  the 
forces  of  the  world's  civilization  are  concentrating 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  35 

about  the  Pacific.     And  it  is  a  truism  of  the 
schools  and  of  the  market-place,  of  the  stock  ex- 
change and  of  the  streets  that  the  forces  of  our 
American  life  will  shape  the  destinies  of  that 
civilization.     It  will  be  a  dull-witted  church  in- 
deed which  does  not   comprehend  her  proper  i 
place  and    her   incomparable    mission  in  con- 
tributing to  those  forces.     With  the  plain  facts 
and  even  plainer  prophecies  of  history  before  her,  / 
what  attitude  do  you  suppose  a  great  church,  f 
conceiving  herself  as  commissioned  of  God  with  a 
serious  task,  your  church  and  my  church, — what 
attitude  do  you  suppose  such  a  church  will  take 
to  to-day's  Western  mission? 

If  a  ghastly  object-lesson  is  demanded  to 
quicken  thought  and  give  the  spur  to  endeavour, 
one  is  amply  afforded  in  the  city  of  San  Fran- 
cisco. On  the  morning  of  the  18th  day  of  April, 
in  1905,  when  the  entire  population  were  shaken 
out  of  their  beds,  and  driven  destitute  from  their 
homes  by  the  fire,  it  is  said  there  were  actually 
fewer  Protestant  Christians  in  the  population  of  j 
the  city  than  there  were  in  the  previous  decades, 
though  that  population  had  during  the  period 
multiplied  fivefold.  Can  any  one  fail  to  believe 
that  there  is  a  direct  connection  between  that 
fact  and  the  spiritual  and  moral  obliquity  in  that 
city  which  have  for  this  long  time  been  coming 
to  light  ?  How  many  duplicates  of  San  Francisco 
do  we  wish  to  construct  in  the  West  ?  What  will 
be  the  nature  of  the  civilization  of  the  Pacific  if  f 
its  impacts  upon  the  future  are  controlled  by  the  \ 


36  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

forces  which  have  been  at  work  in  San  Francisco  ? 
What  sort  of  spiritual  vitality  will  the  American 
Eepublic  contribute  to  the  civilization  of  the 
Orient  if  it  must  flow  out  of  the  slough  of  moral 
obliquity  through  which  grand  juries  and  prose- 
cuting attorneys  have  been  wading  for  these  many 
months  ?  What  is  to  give  stability  and  perma- 
nence to  the  triumph  of  civic  honesty  and  self- 
respect  which  was  achieved  at  the  last  election, 
even  in  a  vice-besotted  San  Francisco?  What 
force  does  the  West  need  in  its  moulding  civiliza- 
tion? What  force  does  the  Church  of  Christ 
think  it  needs  1 

There  is  no  room  for  any  of  us  to  ascend  to 
high  dudgeon  and  talk  in  horrified  condemnation 
of  the  wild  and  woolly  and  godless  West.  The 
West  comes  all  too  legitimately  by  whatever  of 
wickedness  may  be  charged  against  it.  The  West 
has  got  its  badness  from  the  East.  We  are  one 
nation.  The  bonds  of  the  spiritual  unities  are 
holding  us  more  firmly  every  day.  The  question 
is  sometimes  asked  with  some  impatience,  Why 
should  the  East  still  be  burdened  with  appeals  for 
help  from  the  West?  Is  not  the  West  able  to 
take  care  of  itself?  To  be  sure  the  West  can 
take  care  of  itself,  is  already  to-day  more  than 
taking  care  of  itself.  It  is  becoming  increasingly 
busy  taking  care  of  the  East,  for  that  matter. 
You  scarcely  sit  down  to  a  meal  but  your  table  is 
laden  with  a  delicacy  or  a  staple  for  which  you 
are  indebted  to  the  West  and  must  be  so.  Fi- 
nancial experts  are  testifying  that  what  little  of 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  37 

stability  inhered  in  the  financial  structure  of  the 
Eepublic  during  the  recent  panic  was  contributed 
by  the  inexhaustible  material  resources  of  the 
West  from  which  such  large  draft  has  been  and 
is  being  made. 

But  the  churches,  how  comes  it  that  they  still 
require  financial  aid,  why  cannot  the  churches 
hold  their  own  ? 

Hold  their  own  ?  They  more  than  hold  their 
own.  The  churchmen  of  certain  sections  of  the 
denomination  with  which  I  am  most  familiar, 
gave  more  money  on  the  average  to  the  combined 
enterprises  of  the  Church  last  year  than  did  any 
others  anywhere  in  the  land.  Indeed  they  fairly 
doubled  the  per  capita  average  of  most  sections 
of  the  Eastern  Church.  Hold  their  own  !  To  be 
sure  they  hold  their  own  ;  but  far  the  larger  share 
of  their  burden  is  not  their  own.  What  and  who 
are  causing  the  Church  problem  of  the  West,  and 
imposing  such  a  perpetual  and  increasing  strain 
upon  the  spiritual  resources  of  these  imperial 
commonwealths  ?  Who  but  your  own  sons  and 
daughters  ? — if  you  live  in  the  East ;  what  but  the 
perpetual  stream  of  immigration  from  every  East- 
ern state?  We  are  indeed  building  a  common- 
wealth. Every  man,  woman  and  child  in  this 
Eepublic  is  indissolubly  linked  in  all  of  his  vital 
interests  with  the  life  of  each  community  however 
apparently  remote,  and  his  spiritual  destinies  are 
bound  up  with  its  spiritual  condition. 

I  met  a  virile  young  pastor  the  other  day  in  one 
of  the  leading  coast  cities  who  eight  months  ago 


38  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

stood  on  a  bare  lot  in  the  city's  suburbs.  To-day 
he  may  stand  in  the  entrance  of  a  six  thousand 
dollar  Xhurch  property,  paid  for  and  dedicated, 
and  sweep  his  eye  over  the  near-by  community 
where  one  hundred  homes  are  in  process  of  erec- 
tion, not  one  of  which  is  paid  for  and  not  one  of 
which  will  be  rented.  Which  means  plainly 
enough,  you  understand,  that  hundreds  of  families 
have  settled  to  build  up  a  community  without  re- 
source except  the  inexhaustible  raw  material  in 
their  hands  and  the  superbly  indefatigable  West- 
ern spirit  in  their  breasts.  The  Western  churches 
holding  their  own  ?  Is  not  that  young  minister 
and  the  community  which  he  serves  making  good 
the  investment  for  the  Church  of  the  few  hundreds 
of  dollars  demanded  partially  to  support  that  en- 
terprise for  a  year  or  two?  The  city  of  Port- 
land,— mark  the  prophecy — will  never  reveal  to 
an  astonished  world  the  abysses  of  moral  obliquity 
which  San  Francisco  has  presented.  For  one 
thing,  there  are  already  twenty  Presbyterian 
churches  among  its  less  than  200,000  population, 
not  to  speak  of  the  splendid  work  of  the  other 
denominations  and  of  other  vital  institutions,  in- 
spired by  the  Church,  already  long  established. 

How  long  will  the  West  remain  a  missionary 
field  ?  That  depends  much  upon  what  one  means 
by  the  question.  If  it  is  inquired  how  long  the 
West  will  wring  tears  from  the  eyes  of  the  chari- 
table and  claim  pittances  in  the  relief  of  physical 
destitution,  there  is  to  reply,  Never  ;  the  West 
makes  no  such  appeal  now,  nor  in  reason  or  the 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  39 

economy  of  Providence  will  it  ever  present  such 
an  appeal.  The  West  is  prosperous,  enormously- 
prosperous  ;  not  all  the  follies  and  worse  of  the 
jugglers  of  finance  can  more  than  momentarily 
cripple  its  prosperity.  But  if  it  is  inquired  how 
long  the  West  will  continue  to  be  a  field  for  the 
investment  of  funds  and  forces  guaranteeing  in- 
comparable returns  in  the  kingdom  of  God  for 
the  Eepublic  and  for  the  world,  there  is  to  reply, 
Indefinitely ;  for  you  and  me.  Always.  Though 
population  pour  into  that  vast  region  at  the 
present  almost  incredible  rate,  you  and  I  will 
long  be  dead  and  gone,  before  the  West's  incal- 
culable, and  as  yet  unimagined  resources  shall  be 
more  than  scratched.  The  missionary  question 
is.  Will  the  Church  match  its  spiritual  opportunity 
with  a  spiritual  investment,  far-seeing,  prophetic, 
princely,  an  investment  commensurate  with  the 
prophecies  of  the  most  superbly  forceful  civiliza- 
tion now  being  shaped  anywhere  on  the  globe. 

There  need  be  no  blinking  the  fact  that  if  the 
Church  of  Christ  shall  be  content  to  go  gingerly, 
limpingly,  simperingly  at  this  business,  it  is  the 
most  difficult  missionary  proposition  the  Church 
now  has  before  it.  It  is  so  difficult  as  to  be  prac- 
tically hopeless.  It  is  easy  to  patronize  the  in- 
digent into  the  benefits  of  salvation  ;  at  least  we 
often  suppose  the  task  easy,  and  congratulate  our- 
selves upon  the  marvellous  apparent  success  of 
the  proceeding.  But  it  is  a  very  different  propo- 
sition so  to  reveal  vitalities  of  the  Christly  re- 
demption, and  the  essences  of  His  spiritual  con- 


40  MISSIONS  STEIKWO  HOME 

quest  of  the  human  life,  that  this  most  aggressive 
and  puissant  people  will  feel  the  quickening  of 
that  redemption  and  wiU  yield  their  splendid  en- 
ergies to  that  conquest.  This  latter  is  precisely 
the  opportunity  presented  the  Church  of  Christ 
in  the  West.  If  she  really  understands  her  mis- 
sion in  the  world,  this  is  the  supremely  inspiring 
task.  Our  lame  spiritual  forces  are  often  lament- 
ing the  terrible  materialism  of  our  age,  and  espe- 
cially of  our  Western  civilization.  Let  me  assure 
you  that  the  Westerner  is  not  a  materialist ;  there 
is  no  more  exuberant  idealist  in  the  world  than 
he.  The  missionary  problem  of  the  West  is  not, 
as  some  may  be  inclined  to  think,  the  eradication 
of  the  Westerner's  materialism.  There  is  rather 
the  revelation,  to  the  world's  prince  of  idealists, 
of  an  ideal  fit  for  so  splendid  a  striving  as  that  of 
which  he  has  already  showed  himself  capable. 

I  hope  you  understand,  therefore,  that  we  of 
the  Church  of  Christ  have  committed  to  us  not 
merely  the  evangelization  in  the  West  of  twenty- 
five  millions,  more  or  less,  of  human  beings.  For 
their  own  sakes  and  as  mere  human  beings,  the 
people  of  the  western  five-sevenths  of  the  United 
States  are  no  better  than  any  other  human  beings  ; 
of  course  not.  And  if  we  are  out  to  count  noses, 
there  are  at  the  most  only  twenty-five  millions. 
A  paltry  handful,  as  numbers  go.  But  the  im- 
portance, the  eternal  sanctity  of  the  Church's  mis- 
sion in  the  West  appears  rather  in  this  ;  that  here 
she  has  the  chance  to  touch  and  shape  the  forces 
bound  to  be  the  most  potent  in  the  world  for 


CONQUEST  OF  THE  WEST  41 

hastening  or  retarding  the  kingdom  of  God.  j 
Here  is  the  chance  to  redeem  those  who  shall  in 
their  turn  be  in  very  truth  the  world's  redeemers 
or  who  shall  live  and  strive  to  curse  the  world. 
The  West,  the  biggest  portion  of  this  great  land  of 
ours,  uncovers  the  question  as  to  whether  the 
Church  of  Christ  conceives  itself  large  enough  and 
vital  enough  to  make  the  kingdom  of  God  a 
reality  in  the  most  potent  civilization  in  the 
world.  You  and  I  have  the  spiritual  vision  and 
energy  to  be  sure  how  that  question  will  be  an- 
swered.    Have  we  not  ? 


ni 

THE    LATEST    IN    THE    IMMIGEATION 
BUSINESS 

The  latest  in  the  immigration  business  is  emi- 
gration. That  may  sound  like  an  Irishman's  way 
of  putting  it,  but  if  the  pedigree  of  some  of  us 
were  examined  it  might  reveal  justification  for 
our  talking  Irish.  An  exceedingly  interesting 
development  of  immigration  is  this  new  phase. 
The  tide  is  moving  in  the  other  direction  ;  those 
who  crowded  in  are  crowding  out ;  those  who 
were  in  such  a  hurry  to  get  over  are  in  no  less  a 
hurry  to  get  back.  It  was  President  Harrison, 
was  it  not,  who  set  one  of  his  most  brilliant 
periods  of  oratory  to  scintillating  with  the  asser- 
tion that  the  gates  under  the  torch  of  the  Statue 
of  Liberty  swing  always  in  and  never  out  ?  Well, 
they  have  been  swinging  out  of  late.  The  crowds 
going  out  have  been  larger  than  those  coming  in. 
What  is  it  the  papers  have  been  announcing! 
Seventy-five  thousand  steerage  passengers  em- 
barking for  European  ports  in  a  week's  timet 
Two  hundred  thousand  already  been  transported 
abroad  during  the  past  month  or  two?  Some 
good  authority  estimates  that  300,000  will  go  be- 
fore the  present  season  is  over.  Perhaps  that  is 
a  conservative  estimate  and  there  will  be  more 

42 


IN  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     43 

still.  ^  Whatever  may  be  made  of  the  statistics  of 
the  business,  the  phenomenon  is  interesting,  even 
for  those  of  us  who  have  the  least  taste  for  statis- 
tics. And  each  of  us  is  philosopher  enough  to 
enjoy  mulling  over  the  facts  a  bit. 

The  fact  is,  the  foreigners  are  going  back  home 
in  astonishing  numbers.  But  after  all  it  is  only 
the  numbers  which  are  astonishing.  So  are  you 
going  back  home,  to  New  England,  say,  or  some- 
where else,  going  back  home  about  this  time  to  help 
eat  the  Christmas  plum  pudding  in  the  old  home- 
stead. Why  should  not  these  neighbours  of  ours 
do  the  same  ?  They,  too,  want  to  see  the  old  folks, 
and  it  is  likely  that  they  will  enjoy  a  Christmas 
dinner  as  much  as  anybody.  And,  on  second 
thought,  the  numbers  are  not  so  astonishing. 
These  numbers  at  the  largest  are  only  a  few  com- 
paratively.    Cold  weather  has  come  on.     Some 

*  The  following  paragraph  is  from  the  Outlook  for  January 
11,  1908  :  "At  the  present  time  the  only  exact  information 
on  the  subject  of  immigration  within  the  reach  of  the  people 
of  the  United  States  is  contained  in  the  annual  reports  of  the 
Commissioner-General  of  Immigration  and  the  last  census. 
The  former  leaves  the  immigrant  at  the  exit  of  the  immigra- 
tion station,  and  the  latter  is  inadequate  and  antiquated  so 
far  as  the  subject  of  the  effects  of  immigration  are  concerned, 
for  its  statistics  were  gathered  before  the  full  force  of  the 
present  wave  was  felt.  The  flow  of  immigration  also 
reached  a  new  mark  last  year ;  a  fact  which  we  have  already 
reported  and  commented  upon.  The  phase  of  the  subject 
which  presented  itself  in  the  course  of  the  year  that  will 
probably  attract  the  most  attention,  was  the  volume  of  the 
eastward  flow,  in  the  course  of  the  last  two  months,  of  those 


I 


/ 


44        MISSIONS  steiki:n^g  home 

of  the  industries  have  shut  down,  partly  on  ac- 
count of  the  financial  stringency  and  partly  be- 
cause it  is  winter,  and  exposed  work  is  difficult 
if  not  impossible.  This  is  the  most  convenient 
time  of  year  for  those  who  have  recently  left 
fathers  and  mothers  and  wives  and  children  on 
the  other  side  to  go  back  and  pay  them  a  visit. 
Great  numbers  do  that  thing  every  winter ;  only 
more  than  usual  are  doing  it  this  winter.  Per- 
haps more  are  temporarily  out  of  employment, 
but  that  fact  does  not  altogether  account  for 
the  increased  migration.  They  got  started : 
that  is  the  most  moving  fact  j  and  they  are  keep- 
ing at  it.  It  is  a  psychological  phenomenon.  It 
is  the  contagion  of  a  thought.  Going  back  home 
has  got  popular.  It  is  like  wearing  rats  or  side- 
whiskers  :  people  get  started  and  of  course  then 
it  is  all  the  go.  The  bare  attractions  of  I^ewport 
or  Atlantic  City  do  not  account  for  the  summer 
migration  in  those  directions.  The  crowd  gets 
moving  and  everybody  goes  who  can.  It  is  be- 
coming quite  generally  pleasant  for  those  who 

styled  "emigrant  aliens."  This  was  so  abnormal  that  it  is 
causing  much  apprehension  regarding  its  effect  on  the  coun- 
tries to  which  they  have  been  and  are  returning.  It  is  pos- 
sible to  obtain  a  good  idea  of  the  volume  from  the  data  com- 
piled by  the  Transatlantic  Steamship  Conferences.  The 
record  shows  that  103,848  persons  sailed  for  Europe  from 
United  States  and  Canadian  ports  in  the  third  or  immigrant 
class  between  November  22d  and  January  1st.  The  number 
who  turned  their  faces  eastward  in  the  course  of  the  year, 
the  same  statistics  being  used  as  a  basis  of  computation,  was 
550,045,  or  more  than  two-fifths  of  the  westward  movement. " 


IN  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     45 

like  tliat  sort  of  thing,  and  fashionable  even  for 
those  who  don't,  to  take  a  trip  to  Europe.     These 
multitudes  are  caught  in  the  grip  of  fashion  as 
well  as  wrought  upon  by  the  yearnings  for  home, 
and  this  is  not  the  first  time  fashion  has  precipi- 
tated a  stampede.  , 
Now,  the  thoughtful  will  have  observed  that  | 
only  Mr.  Astor  and  a  few  others  remain  in  Europe  | 
after  once  having  been  in  America.     By  far  the  ? 
most  get  back  here  sooner  or  later.     What  has 
been  so  common  in  the  past  there  is  peculiarly 
strong   reason    to  believe  will  be  again.     The 
winter  emigrants  have  in  former  years  proved 
the  spring  immigrants.     And  even  those  who, 
linger  longer  than  the  following  spring  usually 
find  their  way  back  at  length  if  they  are  not  too 
old  or  otherwise  incapacitated  for  the  journey. 
Instead  of  this  emigration  to  Europe  meaning  a 
decrease  in  immigration  into  the  United  States, 
it  rather  indicates  that  we  are  to  prepare  for  such 
an  influx  from  Europe  in  the  near  future  as  shall 
shatter  these  astonishing  records  which  we  have 
for  this  long  time  past  been  compelled  to  make 
over  every  month  or  two.^    I  stood  at  the  elbow 
of  one  of  the  guards  at  Ellis  Island  not  long  ago 
as  the   stream  of  newcomers  was  surging  by. 
Along  came  a  sturdy  Slovak  staggering  under  a 
great  burden  of  baggage,  followed  by  his  wife,  as 
heavily  laden,  and  a  troop  of  children.     *^See 

1  As  this  goes  to  press  the  newspapers  are  reporting  an 
enormous  pressure  already  commenced  at  some  of  the  Euro- 
pean ports  for  passage  by  steerage  to  America. 


46  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

that  fellow,"  exclaimed  the  guide.  '^Been  to 
America  before.  See  that  collar  ? '  ^  Next  spring 
or  later  the  multitudes  now  going  to  Europe  will 
be  returning,  wearing  collars  this  time,  and  ac- 
companied by  their  wives  and  children.  These 
are  not  deserters ;  you  must  not  conclude  that  too 
hastily  ;  they  are  rather  recruiting  agents,  all  the 
more  ardent  that  they  are  self-appointed.  If 
there  is  anybody  anywhere  in  the  remotest  com- 
munity of  the  old  world  who  has  not  heard  of 
America  and  high  wages,  he  will  not  be  left  in 
ignorance  long.  Three  hundred  thousand  can 
scatter  themselves  over  a  great  deal  of  territory. 
If  after  the  opening  of  the  new  calendar  year 
there  shall  be  a  return  all  along  the  line  of  finan- 
cial and  industrial  confidence,  of  which  there  is 
promise,  and  if  those  enterprises  which  have  here 
and  there  in  all  parts  of  the  country  only  been 
projected,  shall  take  advantage  of  returned  confi- 
dence for  their  immediate  development,  there 
will  be  such  a  demand  for  labourers  as  not  even 
this  army  of  recruiting  agents  can  muster,  and 
high  wages  and  every  other  influence  will  co- 
operate to  draw  in  such  multitudes  as  we  have 
not  quite  conceived  of  as  yet. 

To  be  sure,  the  supply  is  being  exhausted  in 
some  quarters  of  Europe.  It  is  stated  that  south- 
ern Italy  cannot  continue  the  present  output  of 
people  much  longer  since  babies  are  not  being 
born  fast  enough  to  meet  the  demand.  A  few 
years  ago  I  was  wandering  through  a  section  of 
southern  Ireland,  and  fell  into  conversation  with 


IN  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     47 

an  Irish  peasant.  I  asked  him  if  many  from  his 
community  had  emigrated  to  America.  * '  Ach ! "  ^ 
exclaimed  he,  ^'you  might  say  all."  The  pro- 
portion of  Irish  among  the  immigrants  is  not  so 
great  as  a  generation  or  a  half  a  generation  ago. 
I  suppose  the  truth  is  Ireland  is  still  sending  us 
all  who  can  get  away,  but  there  are  not  such 
masses  to  draw  from  as  in  other  countries. 

But  Europe  is  not  exhausted  yet,  and  will  not^  / 
be  for  some  considerable  time.  The  multitudes  ' 
will  continue  to  come  while  the  attractions  offer. 
And  our  wonderful  continent  has  only  begun  to 
offer  attractions.  We  have  only  begun  to  learn  how 
to  do  things  and  to  teach  other  people  how  to  do 
them.  The  tales  about  the  outgoing  multitudes 
may  so  far  have  absorbed  the  attention  of  many 
that  they  suppose  the  stream  of  incomers  has 
been  clogged  or  perhaps  altogether  stopped.  Do 
not  imagine  it.  During  the  past  six  months  the 
immigration  has  increased  at  the  rate  of  twelve 
thousand  a  month  over  the  record  of  the  corre- 
sponding period  of  last  year,  which  was  then  the 
high-water  mark  of  immigration.  The  other  day 
the  inspectors  examined  over  three  thousand  and 
just  as  they  were  finishing  the  word  came  that  new 
cargoes  were  putting  in  at  the  harbour.  Com- 
missioner Watchorn  says  that  these  who  are  re- 
turning to  Europe  would  not  think  of  going  if 
they  did  not  know  that  the  educational  and  other 
tests  are  so  slight  that  they  can  readily  make 

^  If  this  exolamation  looks  German,  the  reader  is  to  under- 
stand that  it  is  also  good  Irish. 


48  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

their  way  again  into  this  country.  It  will  require 
more  than  a  financial  flurry  to  rid  us  of  the  im- 
migration problem.  To  do  that  it  will  be  neces- 
sary to  kill  our  national  prosperity  dead  and 
bury  it  deep.  This  time  it  has  not  even  been 
killed  ;  at  the  worst  it  has  so  far  suffered  only  an 
indisposition.  Secretary  Wilson  announces  that 
henceforth  a  crop  failure  is  in  the  United  States  a 
virtual  impossibility,  and  surely  it  can  be  naught 
but  the  sheerest  folly  or  perfidy  which  might 
blight  our  industries.  I  fear  we  are  in  for  a 
permanent  case  of  prosperity,  and  prosperity 
carries  with  it  an  immigration  problem,  and  will 
continue  to  do  so,  so  long  as  present  world  con- 
ditions prevail. 

It  must  stretch  the  imagination  of  the  most 
thoughtful  to  compass  the  meaning  of  present 
tendencies.  For  the  most  part  we  have  consid- 
ered this  immigration  business  as  a  matter  of  our 
own  concern.  Here  is  New  York  City  increasing 
in  population  at  such  and  such  a  rate  ;  a  remark- 
able thing  !  and  we  have  Oh-ed  and  Ah-ed  our- 
selves hoarse  over  the  astonishing  phenomenon. 
Here  is  Jersey  City,  swarming  with  newcomers 
and  emitting  fumes  of  garlic  till  we  flee  before 
them.  That  is  wonder  enough  for  many  of  us, 
and  our  powers  of  philosophizing  are  exhausted 
with  the  nausea  of  smelling  garlic  and  sweat. 
Some  of  us,  more  thoughtful,  ponder  the  in- 
fluence of  all  this  multitude  upon  our  free  and 
unrestricted  suffrage.  What  sort  of  voters  will 
such  people  make  ?  we  wonder  ;  as  well  we  may. 


m  THE  IMMIGRATION  BUSINESS     49 

We  are  alarmed  for  our  institutions.  Will  these 
newcomers  be  true  to  them?  Shall  these  louts 
and  bumpkins,  held  under  for  the  generations  by 
a  harsh  autocracy,  have  safely  committed  to  them 
the  delicate  sanctions  of  democracy!  Can  we 
assimilate  these  ?  We  look  farther  still  and  spec- 
ulate, perhaps  in  horror,  as  to  the  amalgam  which 
will  be  produced  by  the  social  intermingling  of 
all  the  races  which  are  here  met.  That  is  the 
way  we  talk  and  that  is  the  question  which  gags 
and  stops  the  breath  of  the  most  of  us.  But, 
bless  our  hearts,  is  that  the  limit  of  our  vision, 
and  does  our  imagination  stretch  no  farther  than 
that?  At  the  largest,  perhaps,  immigration  has 
in  the  thought  of  most  of  us  exhausted  itself  with 
being  an  American  problem.  This  season's  spec- 
tacle must  lift  upon  our  horizon  the  universal, 
world-marked  phases  of  this  business. 

One  of  our  popular  magazines  recently  in- 
cluded an  article  on  what  was  styled  the  Human 
Side  of  Immigration.  Under  that  caption  the 
writer  from  a  broad  knowledge  of  actual  facts  and 
conditions  centred  attention  upon  what  our  Amer- 
ican immigration  business  is  doing  for  Europe. 
Such  facts  as  these  already  stand  out  where  he 
who  runs  may  read.  The  standard  of  living  all 
over  Europe  is  being  raised.  A  day's  labour 
in  many  sections  brings  twice  the  wage  to-day  it 
brought  only  a  few  years  or  months  ago.  The 
labour  congestion  has  been  relieved  by  American 
immigration.  American  money  is  pouring  into 
all  sections.    They  report  that  in  one  week  these 


50  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

I    who  have  been  recently  going  back  carried  along 

?     with  them  five  million  of  our  precious  currency 

dollars  and  as  much  more  money  in  other  forms. 

This  makes  no  mention  of  the  vast  sums  which 

are  sent  by  our  foreign  population  to  relatives 

I    in  Europe  through  the  mails.     All  this  has  had 

5    a  wholly  natural  effect  of  making  it  easier  and 

more  wholesome  living  all  over  Europe. 

Further,  social  and  civic  ideals  are  being  re- 
moulded by  the  free  passage  back  and  forth  such 
I  as  we  are  now  witnessing.  It  is  said  that  there 
is  almost  no  community  of  Europe  whose  life  has 
not  been  tinctured  if  not  revolutionized  by  this 
I  process.  The  mails  are  laden  every  day  with 
j  letters  interpreting  a  gospel  of  higher  and  freer 
living.  Visitors  are  more  effective  ministers  still 
of  such  a  gospel.  It  is  a  gospel  to  put  faith  in. 
The  demonstration  is  conclusive  to  the  people 
however  simple-minded  and  unbelieving  they 
may  be.  Many  return  to  live  out  their  days  in 
the  old  European  home,  after  sojourning  in 
America  for  a  long  enough  period  to  have  ac- 
cumulated a  competence.  Depend  upon  such  as 
preachers  of  the  new  gospel,  they  have  learned 
during  their  sojourn.  Better  houses,  more  to  eat, 
finer  to  wear,  fuller  freedom  and  capacity  to 
think  and  enjoy  the  simple  human  liberties, — all 
that  has  already  made  over  many  a  community 
in  Europe,  the  energies  for  such  a  transformation 
being  carried  bodily  by  those  who  have  in  one 
way  and  another  been  constituting  what  we  sup- 
posed was  our  American  problem  of  immigration. 


IK  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     51 

We  surely  begin  to  discover  by  this  time  that 
here  we  are  concerned  with  world  business,  such 
world  business  as  the  imagination  can  scarcely 
compass. 

Does  your  mind  comprehend  this  fact :  We 
have  just  now,  during  the  last  month  or  so,  sent 
over  to  Europe  200,000  missionaries.  How  is 
that  for  missioning  ?  That  is  doing  the  business 
on  a  scale  which  boards  do  not  undertake.  Just 
a  month  or  so — 200,000  of  them.  And  such  mis- 
sionaries !  missionaries  to  whom  attaches  no  taint 
of  professionalism.  Nobody  can  throw  it  back  at 
them  that  they  are  preaching  their  gospel  for 
pay.  They  preach  their  gospel  because  they 
cannot  help  it,  because  their  faith  has  found  its 
assurance  in  what  has  been  wrought  in  their  own 
experience.  The  root  of  the  matter  is  in  them- 
selves,— in  their  pockets'?  no  !  no !  not  alone  in 
their  pockets ;  the  roots  have  run  far  deeper. 
What  if  the  roots  had  run  to  the  perennial  depths  1 
What  if  these  had  been  given  to  see  the  best, 
the  very  best  in  American  civilization?  What 
if  they  had  found  a  real  Christian  civilization  ? 
What  if  the  Church  of  Christ  had  been  equal  to 
its  task  here,  and  the  spiritual  forces  which  she 
wields  had  run  through  and  through,  and  satu- 
rated the  lives  of  these  200,000  missionaries  I 
What  sort  of  missionaries  would  they  be  1  What 
could  they  not  achieve  on  this  mission  which 
they  have  set  about  ? 

And  a  second  flight  of  the  imagination  carries 
one  far  beyond  Europe  j  the  plain,   published 


62  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

facts  carry  one  further  without  the  aid  of  the 
imagination.  What  is  this  we  are  reading  in  the 
newspapers  of  the  pouring  of  Hindus  into  our 
vast  West  to  build  its  railroads  and  till  its  illimit- 
able ranches'?  What  will  be  the  effect  when 
India  sets  the  migrating  currents  to  surging  in 
and  out  of  her  sluggish,  swampish,  fathomless 
seas  of  humanity  ?  What  quickening  and  fresh- 
ening of  life  will  that  induce  ?  Oh,  but  we  shall 
not  risk  that  issue.  We  have  shut  out  the  Chinese ; 
we  are  shutting  out  the  Japanese  as  rapidly  as 
possible ;  and  public  sentiment  will  demand  the 
prevention   of    all   oriental    immigration.     The 

»  problem    Europe  has  imposed  is  bad  enough. 

'  We  cannot  endure  the  load  Asia  might  impose. 
Well,  so  be  it.  The  most  of  the  American  people, 
perhaps,  believe  that  strict  laws  against  oriental 
immigration  are  wise  and  necessary  to  our  na- 
tional health  and  existence.  But  the  people  of 
the  world  have  learned  the  trick  of  emigration, 
and  no  artificial  barriers  can  stay  them  now. 
It  must  be  wise  to  restrict  immigration,  else  so 
many  people  would  not  be  so  sure  of  it,  but 
altogether  to  hinder  it  by  legislation  ? — one  would 
as  well  seek  to  hold  back  the  tides  of  the  sea 
with  a  fish-net  I  We  are  doomed  to  be  a  mis- 
sionary people.  It  is  not  simply  that  we  are 
accorded  the  privilege ;  we  are  doomed  to  it. 
Prosperity  and  boundless  material  resource  and 
the  temperamental  knack  of  doing  things  to 
enrich  the  human  life,  have  all  doomed  us, — 
they  and  the  God  of  those  forces,  who  moves  in 


m  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     53 

and  through  and  above  them  all  to  the  fulfillment 
of  His  high  purposes.  It  is  elemental  fate  and 
kindly  providence  rolled  into  one,  and  we  would 
as  well  square  ourselves  for  the  business. 

This  method  of  missionary  activity  certainly 
presents  its  novelties  to  us  traditionalists.  These 
missionaries  have  not  been  put  through  the 
rigours  of  a  theological  seminary  and  been 
charged  to  the  eyes  with  the  latest  and  correctest 
in  doctrine.  (Pardon  me  j  the  most  ancient  is 
the  correctest  in  theology,  do  they  not  tell  us  ?) 
The  most  of  these  are  probably  short  on  theories 
of  the  faith  they  have  set  out  to  preach.  They 
have  not  applied  for  examination  by  ecclesiastical 
councils  and  been  passed  with  honour  or  even 
approval.  They  have  not  waited  to  be  commis- 
sioned by  a  board  and  been  taken  over  by  a  mis- 
sionary society  as  their  ' '  special  object ' '  and  per- 
sonal ' '  substitute. ' '  Their  setting  forth  is  uncon- 
ventional in  the  extreme,  and  unconstitutional, 
and  knocks  the  missionary  traditions  to  slivers. 
They  did  not  give  us  the  chance  even  to  enquire 
of  their  orthodoxy  or  say  whether  we  wished 
them  to  represent  our  missionary  societies.  It  is 
not  impossible  that  some  neglected  to  sign  the 
volunteer  pledge  before  setting  sail,  and  maybe 
some  of  them  will  be  so  careless  as  not  to  return 
their  quarterly  reports  promptly.  I  fear  these 
200,000  have  knocked  the  traditions  of  the  mis- 
sionary business  into  chaos. 

Now  I  suppose  none  of  us  is  disposed  to  go 
back  on  these  traditions  or  to  animadvert  against 


54  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

methods  of  doing  the  missionary  business  which 
the  wise  men  of  our  boards  and  other  evangeliz- 
ing agencies  are  so  eagerly  pushing,  but  we  shall 
be  blind  indeed  if  we  do  not  discover  in  the  spec- 
tacle before  us  a  method  which  for  prophetic 
potency  and  for  sheer  inevitableness  of  grace 
must  in  the  end  quite  relegate  our  traditions  to 
the  antiquities.  Here  is  the  missionary  method 
of  the  new  day,  the  inevitable  method  of  to-day's 
surging  populations.  Peoples  are  on  the  move ; 
we  cannot  stay  the  movement  if  we  might  choose. 
And  what  signify  our  theories,  or  even  our  most 
persuasive  preachers  of  theories  ?  The  American 
Church  of  Christ  preaches  its  final  doctrine  in 
the  demonstrations  of  American  civilization  and 
American  life.  As  I  just  now  remarked  these 
who  have  gone  out  from  us  are  probably  very 
short  on  the  theories  of  any  formulated  gospel, 
but  they  are  long  on  the  realities,  depend  upon 
that.  They  know  what  they  have  seen  and  heard 
and  felt  during  their  sojourn,  and  the  stamp 
of  it  all  has  stamped  their  souls.  They  have 
gone  to  tell  what  they  have  heard,  to  show  what 
they  have  seen  and  felt.  The  whole  world 
knows,  is  learning  anew  every  day,  how  Chris- 
tian the  United  States  of  America  are.  A  good 
share  of  the  world  has  come  over  to  conduct  a 
personal  investigation,  and  these  surging  multi- 
tudes are  telling  the  rest  out  of  the  knowledge  of 
eye-  and  ear-witness.  The  spectacle  here  dis- 
played is  only  an  index  of  a  universal  fact,  that 
the  time  has  passed  when  we  can  hope  to  save 


.    IN  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     55 

the  world  by  preaching  theories.  The  world  is 
judging  us  and  our  doctrine  by  what  it  sees  of  an 
applied  gospel.  And  it  will  be  our  applied  gos- 
pel which  will  carry  the  finally  convincing  mis- 
sionary message  of  the  American  people  and  the 
American  Church  of  Christ. 

And  what  most  distinguishes  this  new-day  mis- 
sionary method  is  its  immediacy  and  intimacy. 
We  have  reduced  our  traditional  method  to  the 
most  elaborate  and  accurately  adjusted  science. 
We  catch  a  man  young,  put  him  through  the 
rigours  of  a  theological  course,  turn  him  out  just 
so,  get  him  thoroughly  well  groomed  spiritually 
and  intellectually ;  we  set  apart  a  certain  pro- 
portion of  our  scant  benevolences,  just  such  a 
percentage  and  send  him  to  the  antipodes  whence 
it  is  so  interesting  to  receive  voluminous  letters 
describing  the  odd  and  amusing  customs  of  the 
natives  ;  and  so  are  redeeming  the  world.  And 
so  we  are,  to  be  sure.  It  seems  almost  incon- 
ceivable that  it  is  true,  but  the  Holy  Spirit  of 
God  is  potent  enough  to  achieve  wonders  of 
grace  even  by  such  methods.  But  here  is  a 
method  which  admits  of  no  such  indirections. 
This  job  cannot  be  farmed  out  and  hired  done. 
I  sat  in  a  council  of  missionary  experts  not  long 
ago  where  was  proposed  the  policy  of  sending 
to  some  almost  unheard  of  province  of  Europe 
bodily  to  import  ministers  whom  we  should  set 
up  to  preach  the  gospel  to  their  countrymen  who 
have  migrated  to  this  land.  The  policy  was 
seriously  considered    and  some  were  zealously 


66  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

casting  about  for  means  and  measures  by  which 
it  might  be  set  in  operation.  Is  not  that  saga- 
cious missionary  enterprise  ? 

By  the  provisions  of  this  new-day  world-mis- 
sionary business  the  job  cannot  be  hired  done  at 
long  range.  The  most  thrilling  feature  of  the 
enterprise  is  the  absolute  immediacy  of  the  task. 
We  could  not  use  a  pitchfork  at  this  business 
even  if  we  had  one ;  people  are  so  close  up  we 
could  only  jab  somebody  in  wielding  it. 

I  wonder  how  we  are  going  at  the  business. 
Going  to  call  in  theological  alchemists  and  mis- 
sionary experts  who  will  ^' study''  the  ^'prob- 
lem" and  define  a  ^^ method"?  Going  to  call 
in  expert  accountants  to  estimate  how  much  the 
business  will  cost,  and  finally  the  most  expertest 
expert  of  them  all  to  squeeze  out  the  money 
which  is  to  do  the  business  ? 

Will  you  permit  me  to  suggest  that  for  the 
most  part  we  shall  have  our  trouble  for  our 
pains.  The  experts  do  not  know  how  to  handle 
this  proposition ;  the  truth  is  there  are  no  ex- 
perts at  this  method, — none,  that  is,  except 
common-sense  people  here  and  there  who  have 
simply  reached  out  and  taken  hold.  There  is  no 
method  of  going  about  this  business  except  that 
simply  of  going  about  it.  Here  are  Hans  Blinker 
and  Ikey  Snigglefritz  and  Ivan  Ivanofiski  stump- 
ing along  the  street,  reading  the  signs, — or  star- 
ing at  them  in  the  default  of  an  ability  to  read 
them.  They  are  going  to  be  American  citizens  ; 
perhaps  they  will  hurry  back  to  their  old  homes 


m  THE  IMMIGEATION  BUSINESS     57 

to  tell  what  they  have  seen  and  heard  and  felt. 
In  any  case  here  they  are  with  the  soft  side  of 
their  souls  turned  out  ready  to  be  stamped.  Here 
is  the  heart  of  humanity  laid  bare  under  our  hand, 
here  are  world  eyes  filled  with  a  world  spiritual 
wonder  looking  out  at  us.  What  are  we  going 
to  do  about  it  ? 

The  proposition  is  reduced  to  those  simple 
terms.  The  method?  Well,  now  what  is  the 
method  in  such  a  case?  Suppose  we  set  up  a 
sign  in  proper  English,  '^  Strangers  welcomed  to 
the  sanctuary"?  .  .  .  We  might  at  least 
start  a  subscription  list.  .  .  .  How  would  it 
do  to  organize  a  study  class  on  the  rise  and  fall 
of  the  Eoman  Empire  ?  ...  It  looks  to  me 
as  though  this  new-day  missionary  method  had 
brought  us  at  last  snug  up  against  the  realities, 
and  that  there  is  no  artificially  prescribed  proc- 
ess quite  applicable.  All  I  know  who  are  suc- 
ceeding at  the  business — and  there  is  an  enlarg- 
ing number — are  simply  reaching  out  and  taking 
hold. 


IV 

THE  GOSPEL  FOE  AN  AGE  OP 
PEOSPEEITY 

I  STAND  only  to  remark  that  we  would  best 
find  one,  since  that  is  the  sort  of  an  age  we  have 
on  our  hands  needing  a  gospel. 

I  shall  not  be  at  pains  to  define  in  all  details 
the  sort  of  gospel  demanded.  Maybe  I  do  not 
know  how.  But  I  am  full  of  hope,  indeed  of  as- 
surance, that  one  altogether  adequate  to  the  de- 
mands is  to  be  found.  This  demand  imposes  the 
most  pressing  and  perhaps  least  understood  obli- 
gation of  the  moment.  There  are  many  signs  to 
indicate  that  the  Church  at  large,  and  in  our 
home  missionary  enterprise,  is  bewildered  by  the 
lavish  material  prosperity  of  the  American  peo- 
ple. 

We  know  how  to  preach  a  gospel  of  adversity. 
We  have  had  considerable  experience.  Perhaps 
a  large  proportion  of  the  people  of  our  Christian 
communions  would  fail  to  recognize  any  other 
sort  as  a  gospel.  They  expect  and  value  its 
ministrations  in  woe,  and  have  scarcely  discov- 
ered the  use  for  a  gospel  otherwise.  You  have 
seen  the  matter  tested  again  and  again.  The 
fetching  sermons,  at  least  those  which  *^  fetch '^ 
the  ordinary  occupants  of  our  church  pews,  are 

58 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PROSPEEITY        59 

those  designed  to  show  how  the  gospel  can  admin- 
ister consolation.  Our  hymn-books  are  a  further 
witness.  Thumb  through  any  of  them  in  com- 
mon churchly  use,  and  note  the  testimony  they 
bear  to  what  the  most  of  us  take  the  gospel  of 
grace  to  be  for.  In  the  estimate  of  many,  a 
hymn  is  not  a  hymn  unless  it  outbreathes  the 
sentiment  of  a  soul  in  distress.  Much  of  our 
evangelism,  the  evangelism  which,  in  the  popular 
conception,  claims  most  conspicuously  the  name, 
frankly  announces  that  its  gospel  has  a  message 
only  for  the  man  who  is  down  and  out.  And  of 
course  its  appeals  reach  mainly  that  class. 

Are  we  prepared  to  proclaim  a  gospel  of  pros- 
perity, or,  to  put  the  phrase  more  precisely,  a 
gospel  to  fit  an  age  of  prosperity.  It  is  a  matter 
of  exceeding  importance  that  such  a  gospel  should 
be  forthcoming,  since,  as  I  remarked  at  the  start, 
that  is  the  sort  of  an  age  which,  in  spite  of  fluctu- 
ations of  markets  and  industries,  appeals  to  the 
American  Church  for  a  gracious  redemption. 

Our  age  is  not  blind  enough,  or  gluttonous 
enough,  or  in  any  manner  so  insensible  as  to  sup- 
pose that  it  has  no  need  of  a  gospel.  It  desper- 
ately needs  one  gracious  enough  to  redeem  it, 
and  that  our  age  knows  right  well.  What  that 
gospel  is  which  will  meet  this  need  is  the  pressing 
concern  of  the  Church  at  large  ;  it  is  no  less,  and 
perhaps  I  may  say  it  is  even  more,  the  concern 
of  our  missionary  enterprise.  I  hope  to  have  you 
believe  before  we  are  done,  if  you  do  not  already, 
that  we  are  facing  here  one  of  our  livest  mission- 


60  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

ary  problems.  As  already  remarked,  I  do  not 
undertake  to  solve  it,  certainly  not  in  the  next 
fifteen  minutes.  It  will  be  something  to  analyze 
its  factors  and  see  the  demand  of  the  solution. 

You  must  permit  an  extended  parenthesis  here 
to  afford  some  slight  tribute  to  a  gospel  precious 
enough  to  administer  comfort  to  humanity's  sor- 
rowing heart.  It  is  well  that  we  have  found  a 
gospel  for  adversity.  We  would  best  keep  it 
around,  handy  for  emergencies.  Dire  experiences 
have  revealed  the  demand.  Humanity  without 
consolation  in  distress  would  be  in  a  sad  way,  in- 
deed. What  more  flagrant  crime  could  there  be 
than  to  rob  the  weeping,  the  bereft,  the  unfor- 
tunate, the  stricken,  the  heart-broken  of  their 
stay  and  comfort  ?  We  need  a  gospel  for  tears, 
for  humanity  is  much  in  tears.  Without  com- 
fort for  the  bereft  our  estate  would  be  miserable 
indeed,  for  who  escapes  bereavement?  Who 
wants  a  gospel  more  than  the  mother  standing 
beside  the  narrow  open  grave  ?  Who  needs  God 
more  than  Job,  destitute,  bereft,  berated  and 
reproached,  forsaken  of  his  closest  and  dearest? 
He  is  a  criminal  who  would  rob  Job  of  his  trust 
in  God.  It  is  his  last  and  his  best.  Our  evan- 
gelism does  well  that  it  bears  its  message  of  rec- 
lamation to  the  man  who  is  down  and  out,  for  the 
name  of  the  man  is  multitude.  Van  Dyke  has 
revealed  the  exquisite  torture  of  the  ' '  lost  word." 
The  last  distress  of  the  distressed  soul  is  that  in 
his  multiplied  distresses  he  cannot  find  and  look 
up  to  God.    A  gospel  which  could  not  administer 


FOR  AN  AGE  OF  PROSPERITY        61 

comfort  and  consolation  would  be  no  gospel  at 
all.  No  one  can  be  so  foolish  as  to  suppose  that 
we  can  dispense  with  our  gospel  for  adversity. 
Humanity  finds  the  need  wrung  out  of  too  many 
direful  experiences  ever  to  be  unmindful  of  the 
boon.  Not  knowing  that  message  we  should  be 
foolhardy,  indeed,  to  venture  forth  in  response  to 
the  appeal  of  our  age,  or  of  any  age. 

But  without  a  gospel  for  a  prosperous  age,  we 
shall  be  no  less  inadequately  equipped,  for  it  is 
prosperity  which  has  been  afflicting  us  this  long 
time,  and  there  is  really  little  prospect  of  our  get- 
ting permanently  over  it.  After  the  exposures  of 
consciencelessness  in  high  financial  circles,  pros- 
perity seems  far  beyond  our  deserts,  but  the 
aroused  conscience  of  the  American  people  will 
finally  cleanse  even  the  Augean  stables  of  frenzied 
and  brigand  financiering.  Some  of  us  seem  de- 
termined to  make  ourselves  believe  that  a  state 
of  material  abundance  is  abnormal  and  necessarily 
fleeting.  We  have  grown  so  accustomed  to  the 
rhythmical  pendulum-swing  from  hard  times  to 
hard  times,  that  we  accept  the  phenomenon  as 
fate,  and  never  stop  to  question  its  necessity. 
We  have  gone  so  far  as  to  measure  off  these  peri- 
ods in  precisely  defined  cycles  of  years.  And,  to 
be  sure,  reverses  of  fortune  for  the  individual 
and  for  the  community  are  always  to  be  feared. 
The  swaggerish  ways  of  prosperity  are  always 
unbecoming,  and  lead  at  last  to  embarrassment 
and  distress. 

But  there  can  be  absolutely  no  cogent  reasons 


62        MISSIONS  steiki:n^g  home 

why  the  American  people  should  anticipate  a 
disastrous  slump  in  their  material  prosperity, 
outside  the  contingencies  of  human  folly  and 
perfidy.  The  jeopardy  from  those  causes  only 
reveal  the  more  clearly  the  need  of  a  redeeming 
gospel.  Under  our  present  system  one  or  a  few 
financial  demagogues  or  brigands  can  induce 
commercial  ruin  at  almost  any  time  they  may 
choose.  If  the  railroads  do  not  like  the  rough- 
handed  manner  in  which  the  Federal  and  State 
governments  seek  to  squeeze  the  water  out  of 
them,  they  might  take  out  their  dislike  upon  the 
public  until  we  should  all  be  very  sorry,  and  our 
prosperity  would  be  squeezed  out  of  the  public, 
at  least  temporarily,  along  with  the  water  from  the 
railroads.  The  masses  may  turn  spendthrift  and 
waste  their  substance  in  riotous  living.  Certain 
hot-headed  individuals,  abetted  by  innumerable 
newspaper  editors  with  so  little  wit  that  they 
must  exploit  each  latest  manufactured  rumour  to 
fill  their  columns,  might  precipitate  the  entire 
nation  in  a  foreign  war.  But  there  can  be  no  ra- 
tional cause  in  any  quarter  outside  of  such  manifes- 
tations of  our  own  perfidy  or  folly,  for  the  anticipa- 
tion of  aught  but  a  prosperous  age  still  to  succeed. 
A  wide-spread  famine  is  rationally  impossible. 
Secretary  Wilson  says  a  crop  failure  in  the  United 
States  is  henceforth  practically  inconceivable. 
The  entire  fruit  crop  of  the  middle  West  was  only 
last  season  a  failure,  perhaps  the  most  complete 
failure  on  record.  The  financial  loss  was  stupen- 
<ious.    In   addition  river  floods  were  terrible. 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PEOSPEEITY        63 

During  the  summer  I  saw  from  the  car  windows 
thousands  of  acres  of  wheat  already  in  the  shock 
and  corn  of  a  superb  stand,  just  ready  to  tassel, 
turned  into  vast  lakes,  and  doomed  to  complete 
devastation.  Yet  in  spite  of  all  that,  no  one  even 
imagined  that  wide- spread  financial  calamity 
would  be  the  result.  There  are  other  resources 
of  the  field  and  of  the  mine,  and  the  forest  which 
had  not  failed,  nor  been  destroyed.  The  gravest 
calamity  in  one  section  cannot  check  our  national 
prosperity,  much  less  impoverish  the  American 
people.  Even  the  district  last  year  most  directly 
stricken  did  not  pause  to  wail  over  its  misfor- 
tunes. On  the  contrary,  reports  of  rapidly  devel- 
oping commercial  interests  and  of  expanding 
business  have  come  from  practically  every  quar- 
ter of  that  very  section. 

Considering  the  wide  diversity  of  our  national 
resources,  and  the  intimacy  of  association  part 
with  part  in  our  national  life,  it  is  altogether  in- 
conceivable under  any  rational  sanction  that  any 
natural  calamity  should  reverse  the  present  tend- 
ency of  our  national  prosperity.  Surely  it  is 
not  the  will  of  providence  that  we  should  be  any- 
thing else  but  prosperous.  If  a  reverse  of  present 
tendency  is  to  be  charged  in  any  sense  to  provi- 
dential dictation,  it  can  only  be  on  the  principle 
of  the  proverb  maintained  by  the  ancients,  that 
whom  the  gods  would  destroy  they  first  make 
mad.  It  must  be  sheer  madness  on  the  part  of 
the  American  people  themselves  if  they  become 
aught  else  but  prosperous. 


64  MISSIONS  STEIKIKG  HOME 

Such  considerations  make  it  vastly  important 
on  every  account,  that  a  gospel  for  an  age  of 
prosperity  be  preached  to  the  American  people. 
They  are  prosperous  in  spite  of  foolish  and  wicked 
setbacks,  and  there  is  no  adequate  reason  in  the 
world  or  in  heaven  why  they  should  not  remain 
&o  'y  why  they  should  not  become  steadily  and  im- 
mensely more  so  as  the  years  roll  on. 

A  Christian  nation  ought  to  be  prosperous. 
Material  abundance  is  the  legitimate  issue  of  a 
genuine  Christianity,  or  at  least,  it  is  an  unfailing 
by-product.  Eighteousness  exalteth  a  nation, 
exalts  it  in  material  estate  j  it  ought  to  and  it  ac- 
tually does.  When  it  does  not,  there  is  some- 
where a  flaw  in  the  righteousness.  Christ  did  not 
preach  a  gospel  of  poverty,  though  He  presented 
a  well-defined  doctrine  for  the  poor  in  spirit ; — a 
very  different  thing,  it  ought  to  be  remarked. 
One  of  our  popular  story-writers  makes  his  hero 
exclaim,  ^'  I  could  lick  the  man  who  invented  pov- 
erty!'^ Doubtless  the  Christian  attitude  is  not 
precisely  that.  Poverty  has  its  benign  uses  when 
controlled  by  a  wise  and  beneficent  Providence. 
It  was  a  man  of  deep  insights  who  discovered  that 
whom  the  Lord  loveth  He  chasteneth.  But  there 
is  no  ground  either  in  reason  or  in  grace  to  be- 
lieve that  God  means  this  great  Christian  Ameri- 
can people  impotently  to  become  destitute. 
There  is  a  superb  power  in  prosperity  which  He 
wishes  these  people  to  have  permanently  at  their 
command.  He  wishes  to  use  a  prosperous  and 
increasingly  prosperous  people  in  His  age-mould- 


FOR  AN  AGE  OF  PROSPERITY        65 

ing  business  ;  and  it  must  retard  the  fulfillment 
of  His  designs  when  the  ministers  of  His  purpose 
sacrifice  for  some  irrational  or  accidental  cause 
this  tremendous  power.  Be  sure,  therefore,  that 
the  God  of  all  grace,  has  a  gospel  for  such  a 
people.  And  be  equally  sure  that  He  wishes 
that  gospel  discovered  and  faithfully  preached  to 
a  people  of  such  need.  It  lies  upon  the  heart  of 
God,  this  demand  for  a  gospel  for  an  age  of  pros- 
perity. 

Now,  there  are  two  distressingly  common,  and 
distressingly  false  attitudes  towards  the  facts  of 
material  abundance.  The  former  makes  the  fact 
the  for-all  and  to-all  of  human  existence.  Some 
men  live  to  get,  and  account  life  somewhat  less 
than  worth  the  living  if  they  do  not  get  in  super- 
fluity. Such  conceptions  creep  into  the  Church, 
find  root  and  flourish  in  the  minds  of  Christian 
people.  At  least,  we  hear  a  deal  nowadays  about 
the  blight  upon  the  Church  of  materialism.  If  it 
is  true  that  such  conceptions  prevail  in  the 
Church,  the  Church  is  certainly  in  a  lamentably 
bad  way.  A  Christian  who  has  found  nothing  to 
live  for  more  compelling  or  more  satisfying  than 
perpetual  and  monumental  getting  of  material 
possession,  is  least  worthy  the  name  Christian,  as 
he  must  be  of  all  men  most  miserable.  If  our 
age  has  made  a  god  of  material  prosperity,  it  has 
gone  a  far  limit  astray  from  the  Christian's  God. 

It  is  my  firm  conviction  that  our  age,  as  an 
age,  has  not  done  that  thing,  has  not  committed 
the  folly  and  sacrilege  of  making  a  god  of  ma- 


66  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

terial  prosperity.  And  that  conviction  makes 
me  sure  that  this  prosperous  age  needs  a  gospel 
of  grace,  and  that  it  will  hearken  to  such  a  gospel 
when  it  hears  it  intelligently  preached.  The 
American  people  are  not  materialists.  I  quite 
resent  the  charge  for  them.  There  may  appear 
superficial  warrant  in  their  deportment  for  the 
charge.  Surface  critics  may  be  sure  that  they  are 
gone  dollar-mad.  But  even  this  madness  which 
manifests  itself  in  disgusting  fashion  here  and 
there  is  the  evidence  of  a  passion  which  yearns  for 
something  spiritual  enough  for  its  satisfaction. 
Materialism  is  not  what  ails  the  American  people, 
but  rather  they  are  burning  up  with  a  feverish, 
ungratified  passion  for  a  gospel  fine  enough  and 
potently  spiritual  enough  to  redeem  a  prosperous 
people,  and  sanctify  them,  prosperity  and  all. 

The  other  distressingly  false  and  prevalent 
attitude  towards  material  prosperity  is  that  which 
gratifies  a  certain  defeated  spiritual  bitterness  by 
sneering  at  the  instrument  of  the  defeat.  There 
is  a  deal  of  spiritual  indolence  which  excuses 
itself  by  declaiming  against  materialism.  With 
the  disciples  of  old,  it  hearkens  while  the  Master 
exclaims,  How  hardly  shall  they  that  are  rich 
enter  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  and  turns  a  deaf 
ear  when  He  vouchsafes  the  assurance,  All  things 
are  possible  with  God,  and,  finding  the  task 
hard,  indolently  gives  up  the  job  as  too  much  for 
both  man  and  God.  The  Church  has  too  often 
frankly  confessed  that  it  has  no  moving  gospel  to 
preach  till  men  can  be  shocked    by  physical 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PEOSPEEITY        67 

calamities  into  hearkening  to  its  formulas.  An 
immense  deal  of  the  holy  zeal  let  loose  upon  un- 
holy materialism  is  essentially  spiritual  indolence 
or  cowardice.  Prosperity  is  too  much  for  the 
lame  forces  of  our  spiritual  equipment,  and  there- 
fore prosperity  is  somehow  awfully  bad.  The 
only  way  some  parents  have  of  bringing  under  a 
strong-willed  youngster,  is  to  break  the  young- 
ster's back.  At  least,  his  will  must  be  broken. 
The  method  is  effective  to  a  certain  end,  but  it 
is  born  of  laziness,  sheer  laziness.  It  may  be 
feared  that  the  reason  some  spiritually  minded 
people  hate  materialism  so  ferociously  is  because 
they  have  not  the  spiritual  vigour  to  bring  the 
splendid  forces  of  material  prosperity  under  a 
spiritual  dominion.  It  is  hard  to  be  good  and 
prosperous  at  the  same  time.  Feeling  the  com- 
pulsion to  be  good  and  dreading  the  strain  of 
being  prosperous  also,  it  is  concluded  necessary 
to  dispense  with  the  prosperity.  I  do  not  pause 
to  say  how  cowardly  and  inadequate  is  such  a 
philosophy  as  that. 

I  wish  there  were  time  to  add  my  philippic  to 
the  scathing  rebukes  meted  out  by  preachers  of 
righteousness  in  all  ages  upon  men  who  will  seek 
to  serve  God  and  mammon  at  the  same  time,  men 
who  will  squeeze  gain  out  of  their  fellows,  will  get- 
and  get,  by  fair  means  and  by  foul,  and  then  will 
bombard  the  gates  of  heaven  with  their  ill-gotten 
and  more  shamefully  withholden  gain.  Neither 
this  age  nor  any  other  needs  a  gospel  which  will 
teach  it  how  to  serve  God  and  mammon,  how  to 


68  MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 

straddle  the  fence  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
Such  a  gospel  must  always  remain  a  vain  hope, 
even  for  those  deluded  enough  to  long  for  it. 

Nor  am  I  merely  pleading  for  such  sterling 
personal  righteousness  as  shall  qualify  men  to  be 
rich  and  Christian,  each  and  both.  Being  per- 
sonally possessed  of  material  abundance  is  simply 
a  function,  an  isolated  feature  in  the  general 
scheme.  Some  of  us  in  this  prosperous  age  have 
no  anticipation  of  nor  desire  for  being  personally 
endowed  with  wealth.  The  life  is  well-nigh  pes- 
tered out  of  me  by  a  certain  company  of  pro- 
moters who  insist  by  every  means  at  their  com- 
mand in  forcing  upon  my  attention  what  they 
allege  to  be  unprecedented  opportunities  for  the 
investment  of  money.  I  might  be  readily  in- 
duced to  believe  that  their  offers  have  all  the 
virtues  they  claim  for  them,  but  I  have  again  and 
again  assured  the  persistent  promoters  that  I 
have  no  money  to  invest  with  them  or  with  any- 
body else,  and  do  not  so  long  as  I  may  live  expect 
to  have  any.  I  heartily  wish  they  would  quit 
pestering  me.  There  are  perhaps  others  of  us 
who  cherish  the  same  ambition  with  Mr.  Car- 
negie ;  we,  too,  hope  to  die  poor  ;  and  some  of  us 
stand  in  much  more  flattering  prospect  of  realiz- 
ing the  ambition.  But  here  is  one,  at  any  rate, 
who,  in  spite  of  his  personally  impecunious  con- 
dition, yearns  for  a  gospel  of  grace  fine  enough 
and  brave  enough  and  spiritual  enough  to  re- 
deem a  prosperous  age. 

Illustrations  of  what  I  am  seeking  to  impress 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PBOSPEEITY        69 

and  of  the  demand  for  this  gospel  crowd  in  from 
every  side.  I  select  some  which  show  the  issue 
to  be  live  for  the  home  missionary  enterprise. 

It  needs  but  a  cursory  observation  to  show  that 
the  home  missionary  appeal  is,  in  the  considera- 
tion of  large  numbers  of  people,  weakened  to 
practical  impotence  by  tales  of  prosperity. 
Only  the  destitute  are  fit  objects  of  missionary 
solicitude.  There  is  probably  no  needier  or  more 
difficult  missionary  field  in  the  world  than 
Alaska,  but  the  missionary  appeal  for  Alaska 
is  quite  killed  among  many  missionary  audiences 
by  the  mention  of  the  twenty-one  millions  in 
gold  dust  coming  out  each  year.  The  fabulous 
resources  of  fisheries  and  lumbering  interests  may 
not  be  mentioned  with  profit  to  the  missionary 
cause.  A  single  tale  of  extreme  destitution  and 
squalor  which  the  conditions  in  certain  locali- 
ties in  Alaska  justify,  will  often  call  out  more 
missionary  money  than  might  a  cyclopedic  re- 
cital of  the  vast  opportunities  of  grace  in  a  vast 
continent.  Why  is  this  true?  There  may  be 
several  reasons  lying  upon  the  surface  which  you 
may  discern  at  a  glance,  but  a  broadening  ex- 
perience deepens  the  conviction  in  my  mind  that 
the  bottom  reason  is  that  many  have  no  gospel 
which  they  dare  altogether  risk  among  such  con- 
ditions. We  think  we  know  how  to  save  a 
degraded,  superstition-sodden  Alaska,  but  an 
Alaska  riotous  in  rapidly  developing  material 
resource,  an  Alaska  smart  enough  to  dig  out 
gold  by  the  million,  is  a  different  proposition. 


70  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

We  have  a  sort  of  a  subconscious  realization  that 
our  gospel  will  not  fill  the  bill. 

In  the  consideration  of  much  of  the  Church  the 
great  Northwest  is  not  nearly  so  interesting  a 
missionary  field,  since  the  intelligence  is  abroad 
that  the  Northwest  is  growing  fabulously  rich. 
Why?  Because,  if  the  Northwest  is  so  rich,  it 
can  take  care  of  itself.  That  is  the  way  the 
falling  off  in  interest  is  most  often  explained. 
But  to  one  who  looks  deeper  that  explanation 
often  fails  to  explain.  I  know  a  number  of 
churches  who  cannot  quite  believe  they  are  doing 
missionary  business  unless  they  pour  money  year 
after  year  into  the  same  destitute  field.  In  the 
estimate  of  some  of  our  missionary  force  it  is  a 
sort  of  a  missionary  crime  for  a  missionary  field 
to  grow  prosperous.  Some  way  the  gloss  seems 
taken  off.  If  the  missionary  on  the  ground  can- 
not furnish  unlimited  tales  of  physical  destitution 
the  field  ceases  to  be  interesting  to  the  supporting 
agency  and  the  Board  is  appealed  to  to  designate 
a  more  "inspiring'^  field.  There  may  be  vari- 
ous contributory  causes  for  such  an  attitude,  but 
among  them,  and  I  am  convinced  the  bottom 
cause,  is  the  lack  of  a  gospel  with  sufacient  spir- 
itual vigour  to  stand  the  strain  of  prosperity. 

I  have  further  in  mind  the  case  of  a  theologue 
who  last  summer  assumed  the  charge  of  a  West- 
ern home  missionary  field.  He  returned  to 
protest  his  amazement  over  what  he  found.  He 
says  the  summer's  experience  has  robbed  him  of 
his  interest  in  home  missions.     He  found  the 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PEOSPEEITY        71 

people   well-to-do,    enjoying    conveniences    and 
even  luxuries  in  their  homes,  of  which  many  who 
contribute  to  the  missionary  funds  deprive  them- 
selves.    He  later  appealed  to  the  Board  in  some- 
thing of  this  strain;    *'I  had  dedicated  my  life 
to  a  ministry  in  the  uttermost  parts,  but  a  provi- 
dence prevents  my  carrying  out  that  ambition, 
and  now  I  appeal  to  the  Home  Board  to  know  if 
there  is  not  some  really  hard  field  even  in  this 
land  where  I  may  carry  the  gospel  of  grace  to  the 
needy.     I  aspired  to  minister  in  a  hard  field,  and 
I  hope  Providence  has  not  closed  the  door  finally 
against  this  ambition.     Has  not  the  Home  Board 
a  hard  field  for  me  ?  "     Yes,  a  good  and  hard  one  ; 
it  would  seem  too  hard.     It  is  that  very  field 
where  last  summer  he  so  missed  the  point  of  his 
gospel  ministry,  and  where  he  flunked  so  dis- 
tressingly in  revealing  to  an  exceedingly  needy 
people  a  gospel  which  would  bring  them  to  spir- 
itual self-respect  and  self-dependence.     A  gospel 
of  sufficient  spiritual  vigour  to  meet  the  needs  of 
a  prosperous  community  vast  numbers  who  think 
themselves  most  eager  simply  do  not  know,  have 
never  discovered.     They  cannot  interpret  God's 
grace  to  people  with  a  full  stomach  and  warm 
clothing  on  their  backs,   though  the  very  food 
and  the  very  clothing  are  provided  by  that  same 
grace. 

Here  is  a  bit  of  Kansas  history.  It  is  at  least 
certified  to  by  a  prominent  Kansas  churchman. 
The  years  1880  to  1895  are  often  styled  the  period 
of  depression.    Kansas    suffered  terribly  from 


72  MISSIONS  STEIKIKG  HOME 

various  causes  during  that  period.  There  was 
drought  year  after  year.  The  Western  section 
which  began  to  fill  up  at  such  a  marvelous  rate 
was  deserted  at  an  even  more  astonishing  rate. 
The  great  canvas-covered  wagons  which  had  gone 
out  placarded  with  the  confident  legend  '^  Kansas 
or  Bust,"  returned  to  the  states  further  east  with 
the  addition  to  the  legend  in  more  flaming  letters. 
^'Busted."  The  occasional  adventurer  whose 
sense  of  humour  had  survived  the  shock  would 
placard  his  wagon  with  the  announcement, 
^^Goin^  back  to  wife's  folks.''  One  county,  typ- 
ical of  others,  lost  half  its  population  during  that 
period,  its  12,000  being  reduced  to  6,000.  The 
collapse  of  the  famous  Wichita  boom  occurred 
then,  as  did  that  of  numbers  of  other  towns  and 
cities.  Yet  during  that  period,  in  spite  of  the 
enormous  loss  of  population,  and  the  terrible 
financial  depression,  the  Presbyterian  churches 
of  Kansas  increased  their  membership  from 
12,000  to  25,000,  a  gain  of  more  than  one  hundred 
per  cent. 

In  contrast  with  that  record  stands  now  the 
record  of  the  twelve  years  since  1895.  The  pros- 
perity of  Kansas  has  known  no  bounds.^    No 

*  The  following  editorial  paragraph  appeared  in  The  Inde- 
pendent, December  26,  1907:  "The  value  of  the  agricul- 
tural products  of  Kansas  in  1907  would  give  $280  to  each 
man,  woman  and  child  in  the  state  if  divided  equally  among 
the  inhabitants.  And  the  fine  thing  about  it  is  in  Kansas 
wealth  is  pretty  equally  distributed.  Paupers  are  as  rare  as 
millionaires,  and  the  jails  are  as  empty  as  the  poorhouses. 


FOE  AK  AGE  OF  PEOSPEEITY        73 

story  is  too  fabulous  to  recite.  I  heard  a  citizen 
of  Kansas  remark  the  other  day  that  if  any  one 
is  destitute  in  Kansas  to-day,  his  indigence  is 
due  to  criminal  incapacity.  It  is  reported  that 
there  lie  in  the  savings  banks  at  this  moment 
one  hundred  dollars  for  every  man,  woman  and 
child  in  the  entire  state.  The  profits  during 
last  season  from  the  agricultural  products  alone 
are  said  to  have  amounted  to  the  inconceivable 
sum  of  two  hundred  and  forty -six  millions  of 
dollars.  That  makes  no  mention  of  the  returns 
from  the  gas  fields  and  the  oil  fields,  the  cement 
works,  and  the  varied  manufactures  for  all  of 
which  Kansas  enjoys  a  national  reputation.  Yet 
after  this  period  of  astounding  prosperity,  the 
membership  of  the  Presbyterian  churches  in  the 
state  now  stands  at  35,000,  an  increase  for  the 
twelve  years  of  somewhat  over  thirty  per  cent. , 
as  against  the  increase  of  more  than  one  hundred 

Multiply  $280  by  the  number  in  the  home — not  so  small  a 
number  in  Kansas  as  elsewhere — and  you  have  a  very  re- 
spectable family  income.  The  population  has  increased 
twenty  per  cent,  in  the  last  ten  years,  the  value  of  the  prod- 
ucts of  the  state  has  increased  ninety  per  cent.  This  year 
the  crops  and  live  stock  foot  up  to  $463,648,606,  which  is 
$39,313,739  more  than  in  any  previous  year.  This  is  wealth 
that  will  not  shrink  fifty  per  cent,  at  the  threat  of  a  presi- 
dential prosecution  of  illegal  financiering.  Kansas  can  get 
along  without  Wall  Street  at  least  as  well  as  Wall  Street  can 
get  along  without  Kansas.  If  the  people  of  the  state  can- 
not sell  their  wheat  they  can  eat  it,  and  if  they  cannot  buy 
anthracite  coal  they  can  bum  corn,  which  is  a  much  better 
fuel." 


74  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

t 

per  cent,  during  the  preceding  fifteen  years  of 
depression.  Kansas  appears  to  need  a  gospel  for 
lier  age  of  prosperity. 

A  further  illustration  lies  in  the  South,  on 
some  considerations,  the  most  important  home 
missionary  field  now  presented  to  the  church. 
The  South  is  about  to  break  the  record  of  our 
brilliant  American  history  by  its  rapid  material 
development.  And  yet,  by  open  confession, 
some  of  our  missionary  forces  stand  helpless  and 
almost  hopeless  in  the  prospect.  The  first  and 
foremost,  though  not  doubtless  the  last  and  most 
efficient  agency  of  the  South' s  regeneration,  is 
the  railroad.  Many  a  dead  community  has 
found  its  pulse  only  with  the  letting  in  of  life  by 
that  means ;  and  many  another  dead  community 
still  waits  for  that  infusion.  The  material  and 
moral  and  every  other  sort  of  regeneration  of  the 
South  waits  upon  the  railroad  development. 
And  yet  missionary  workers  here  and  there  are 
to  my  own  knowledge  bewailing  the  entrance  of 
this  very  force.  One  zealous  man  assured  me 
that  the  railroad  in  the  South  is  the  greatest 
curse  upon  our  missionary  enterprise.  One  and 
another  have  cited  instances  of  where  our  mis- 
sionary workers  have  conducted  a  patient  and 
protracted  ministry  of  spiritual  uplift,  and  the 
entrance  of  the  railroad  has  by  its  demoraliza- 
tions destroyed  in  months  the  patient  labours  of 
years. 

Are  not  such  complaints  justified  by  the  facts! 
Is  it  not  true  that  many  a  community  has  been 


For.  AN  AGE  OF  PEOSPERITY        75 

grossly  demoralized  by  the  railroad's  unholy  vio- 
lations of  its  seclusion  ?  Instances  of  such  viola- 
tion every  one  has  in  mind  doubtless,  who  has  the 
slightest  acquaintance  with  the  South,  or,  for 
that  matter,  with  the  North  or  East  or  West. 
That  is  a  surface  fact  patent  to  all.  But  the 
forces  of  spiritual  conquest  have  no  business  con- 
tenting themselves  with  the  diagnosis  of  surface 
facts.  A  fact  which  lies  more  nearly  at  the  bottom 
is  that  our  gospel,  which  can  cope  with  the  com- 
paratively easy  conditions  of  seclusion  and  isola- 
tion, does  not  muster  the  spiritual  vigour  for  the 
splendid  spiritual  conquests  of  the  era  of  material 
progress.  The  railroad  is  a  Christian  institution. 
It  will  do  more  to  Christianize  and  redeem  the 
South  than  any  other  one  agency  we  can  call  into 
the  field.  But  do  not  the  railroads  ship  in  vice 
like  dry  goods,  and  in  quantities  pound  for 
pound  ?  I  am  informed  that  they  do  ;  but  I  insist 
that  the  railroad  is  a  Christian  institution,  and 
if  its  influences  cannot  be  captured  for  Christian- 
izing purposes,  our  gospel  has  not  the  spiritual 
vigour  to  stand  the  strain  of  the  missionary  en- 
terprise to-day,  or  any  long  day.  Do  not  the 
railroads  actually  tear  down  and  desecrate  our 
most  precious  Christian  institutions?  Many  of 
us  may  have  seen  them  doing  it ;  but  I  insist 
again  that  the  railroad  is  a  Christian  institution. 
It  has  historically  and  practically  been  made 
possible  by  the  forces  which  have  emanated  from 
the  Christian  religion,  and  a  genuine  Christianity 
will  never  prove  a  house  divided  against  itself, 


76  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

builded  at  great  pains  only  to  fall.  The  problem 
before  the  missionary  forces  of  the  South  is  the 
discovery  and  the  working  out  of  a  gospel  of  suf- 
ficient spiritual  vigour  to  capture  the  splendid 
spiritual  forces  of  the  South' s  splendid  material 
prosperity. 

Those  who  are  interested  in  the  evangelization 
of  the  South  must  not  blind  their  eyes  to  the  fact 
that  its  material  development  will  greatly  injure 
the  missionary  cause  in  the  consideration  of  many 
missionary  helpers.  Some  who  have  been  most 
zealous  in  this  interest  will  find  their  missionary 
zeal  cooled  to  the  zero  point  by  a  perusal  of  (say) 
the  June  (1907)  number  of  the  WorWs  Work, 
The  very  wonders  of  the  story  there  told  will 
make  it  disappointing  missionary  reading  to 
some.  The  myriad  vibrating  shuttles  of  cotton 
mills,  the  roar  of  blast  furnaces,  the  feverish  in- 
dustry of  the  artisan,  and  the  chaste  and  sub- 
stantial decorum  of  a  well-developed  school  sys- 
tem, will  prove  cruelly  deadening  to  a  missionary 
zeal  which  has  all  this  time  been  feeding  upon 
tales  of  cracker  shiftlessness  and  indolence,  has 
gained  a  sort  of  spiritual  inspiration  from  the 
quaint  and  garbled  dialect  of  the  mountains,  has 
reached  a  degree  of  spiritual  revelry  in  the  ver- 
min- and  children-infested  cabins  of  the  secluded 
valleys.  There  will  henceforth  be  a  serious  fall- 
ing off  of  that  sort  of  missionary  interest  in  the 
South.  You  mark  it.  We  would  as  well  make 
up  our  schedules  with  reckoning  made  of  that 
inevitable  issue. 


FOE  AN  AGE  OF  PEOSPEEITY        77 

The  bottom  failing  underneath  all  surface  ap- 
pearances is  that  we  like  to  have  our  gospel 
patronize,  but  we  have  poorly  learned  how  to 
make  it  fraternize  and  democratize.  We  have 
not  really  discovered  the  secret  of  power  in  the 
Man  of  Galilee.  We  know  how  to  reach  down 
to  need,  but  we  have  poorly  trained  ourselves  in 
the  art  of  reaching  out.  We  can  patronize,  but 
it  is  a  different  proposition  genuinely  to  spiritu- 
alize. We  recite  our  philippics  against  the  gross 
and  grossening  materialism  of  our  age,  and  sup- 
pose we  have  done  God  and  man  much  service. 
Now,  materialism  as  a  philosophy  or  a  guiding 
scheme  of  life  deserves,  to  be  sure,  all  our  feeble 
philippics,  and  the  scorching  of  hell  besides. 
But  merely  to  lambaste  the  things  which  make 
up  the  elements  of  material  prosperity  is  sheer 
spiritual  cowardice.  God  never  designed  that 
there  should  be  essential  antagonism  between  the 
material  and  the  spiritual.  It  is  the  business  of 
the  spiritual  forces  to  permeate  and  glorify  the 
material  till  spiritual  potencies  scintillate  from  it. 
Our  age  and  our  home  missionary  enterprise  de- 
mand a  gospel  which  shall  be  able  to  achieve  that 
sort  of  a  thing.  It  is  cheap  business  repressing 
and  suppressing,  winning  a  conquest  over  de- 
generated and  pigmy  forces,  reckoning  men  fit 
for  the  spiritual  conquest  only  when  they  are 
otherwise  forceless.  It  is  a  finer  thing,  it  is  the 
very  essence  of  God's  gospel  of  grace  to  redeem 
the  utmost  of  human  powers,  to  bring  the  most 
splendid  of  human  forces  under  a  spiritual  do- 


78  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

minion.  Our  age  needs  a  brave  gospel.  Our 
age,  too,  will  heed  such  a  gospel  and  will  gladly 
submit  aU  its  splendid  powers  to  such  a  gospel's 
conquest. 


THE  HOME  PEINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS 

Whatever  may  have  been  Shakespeare's  con- 
clusion, there  is  much  in  a  name.  Our  word  mis- 
sions is  derived  from  the  Latin,  mittOj  1  send.  A 
prevalent  interpretation  of  the  missionary  enter- 
prise satisfies  itself  with  a  strictly  literal  deriva- 
tion not  only  of  the  word  but  of  the  idea.  Mis- 
sions is  sending.  Which  it  doubtless  veritably 
is,  but  a  ''  missions''  which  does  not  settle  down 
and  make  itself  at  home  once  it  has  arrived  will 
serve  very  ineffectively  in  setting  up  the  king- 
dom of  God.  It  may  be  proper  enough  for  indi- 
viduals, whose  religious  predilections  prompt 
them,  to  sing, '  ^  I'  m  a  pilgrim,  and  I'  m  a  stranger, ' ' 
but  a  missionary  enterprise  which  regales  itself 
with  that  sentiment,  by  that  very  token  foredooms 
itself  to  defeat.  All  missions  worthy  the  effort 
are  at  last  home  missions.  And  their  real  ef- 
fectiveness will  begin  just  when  they  become 
home  missions. 

Not  long  ago  on  an  occasion  when  I  had  been 
set  to  present  a  phase  of  the  home  mission  enter- 
prise, I  pleaded  with  all  my  might  for  the  deeper 
significance  of  the  idea  embodied  in  this  princi- 
ple. The  chairman  immediately  after  I  had 
taken  my  seat  suggestively  remarked  that  the 

79 


80  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

day  has  passed  when  right-minded  people  dis- 
cover any  antagonism  between  home  and  foreign 
missions.  I  suppose  he  intended  that  I  should 
accept  a  mild  rebuke  for  the  vehemence  with 
which  I  had  prosecuted  the  pleading.  Whether 
I  was  inclined  to  accept  the  rebuke  or  not,  I  cer- 
tainly was  much  disappointed  that  I  had  not  ap- 
parently succeeded  in  bringing  even  the  chair- 
man to  see  the  point  of  my  insistence.  No  ;  to 
be  sure  there  is  no  antagonism  between  home  and 
foreign  missions.  It  is  the  very  beauty  and 
power  of  the  Christian  religion  that  it  belongs 
everywhere,  that  no  land  is  foreign  to  it,  and  it 
is  foreign  to  no  land.  There  can  be  no  antag- 
onism between  home  and  foreign  missions  since 
the  prime  condition  of  the  success  of  any  mis- 
sions is  that  it  shall  forthwith  make  itself  at 
home.  The  home  principle  runs  through  all 
missions. 

If  my  sister  is  to  carry  the  real  Christ  message 
to  Korea,  whither  she  has  gone  to  teach  and  live 
the  gospel,  she  must  not  fail  to  make  herself  and 
her  ministry  at  home  and  a  home  mission  among 
the  Koreans.  The  reason  a  friend  of  mine  is 
succeeding  in  his  mission  to  Japan  is  because  he 
has  done  that  very  thing.  The  reason  a  certain 
other  friend  is  failing  so  distressingly  elsewhere 
is  because  he  has  not  done  that  thing,  but  has 
persistently  harboured  the  notion  and  has  every- 
where given  the  impression  that  he  is  on  a  mis- 
sion, that  he  belongs  somewhere  else  and  that  he 
is  there  to  ladle  out  what  he  has  been  generous 


THE  HOME  PEINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    81 

enough  to  bring  along.  It  is  the  prime  requisite 
of  any  and  all  missions  that  they  be  and  confirm 
themselves  home  missions. 

There  is  wholesome  warrant  for  this  assertion 
in  the  example  of  the  chief  exponent  of  the  mis- 
sioning enterprise,  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  We  often 
speak  as  though  we  supposed  this  supreme  mis- 
sionary belonged  somewhere  else,  and  that  it  was 
quite  by  accident  if  it  is  not  indeed  an  anomaly 
that  He  was  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  the  Man  of  Galilee, 
the  familiar  of  the  towns  and  cities  of  Judea.  We 
magnify  the  condescension  of  the  Son  of  God  in 
leaving  the  bosom  of  the  Father  for  His  earthly 
ministry  until  we  sometimes  make  it  seem  that 
Jesus  did  not  ever  quite  grow  accustomed  to 
being  what  He  was  and  living  and  serving  where 
He  did.  By  which  course  we  take  the  most  vital 
meaning  out  of  the  gospel  scheme.  Wherever 
Jesus  came  from  and  whithersoever  He  went,  He 
vitally  belonged  where  He  was  while  He  was 
here.  There  was  no  one  more  genuinely  at  home. 
He  saved  the  world  by  being  a  home  missionary, 
and  His  method  of  salvation  is  the  only  really 
effective  one  which  has  ever  been  devised.  He 
certainly  meant  what  He  said  when  He  charged 
His  followers  to  go  into  all  the  world  and  disciple 
the  nations,  but  certainly  did  not  mean  that  His 
own  example  and  His  method  should  be  lost  upon 
them  when  they  should  address  themselves  to  the 
task  assigned. 

There  is  no  more  daring  deed  recorded  of  this 
high  Master  of  the  missioning  enterprise  than 


82  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

that  on  the  occasion  of  His  one  foreign  mission, 
as  it  is  sometimes  erroneously  styled.  Only  once 
seems  Christ  voluntarily  to  have  set  foot  out  of 
the  bounds  of  Palestine  proper,  and  that  was 
when  He  passed  into  the  region  of  Tyre  and 
Sidon,  on  what  errand  it  does  not  precisely  ap- 
pear. At  any  rate  while  He  was  there,  it  is 
recorded  that  He  was  encountered  by  a  woman, 
native  of  the  locality,  who  appealed  to  Him  pit- 
eously  for  help.  Turning  upon  the  suppliant  He 
seemed  almost  to  scorn  her  by  saying.  It  is  not 
meet  to  take  the  children's  food  and  cast  it  to  the 
dogs.  By  which  attitude  and  speech  Jesus  did 
not  mean  to  style  the  poor  woman  and  any  other 
human  being  a  dog,  nor  did  He  mean  that  only  a 
Jew  was  worth  saving,  nor  did  He  mean  any 
other  foolish  or  ungodly  thing.  But  whatever 
He  did  not  mean  or  whatever  else  He  did  mean, 
even  at  the  risk  of  being  grossly  misunderstood 
by  those  of  slight  insight.  He  must  have  meant 
to  emphasize  this  essential  quality  of  His  saving 
ministry,  its  vital  and  indefeasible  homeliness. 
And  He  must  have  meant  that  His  example  and 
precept  should  not  fail  of  its  effect  when  His  dis- 
ciples set  about  the  fulfillment  of  His  pressing 
charge  of  discipling. 

The  home  principle  in  missions  does  not  culti- 
vate narrowness  and  selfishness.  A  friend  says 
he  frequently  encounters  people  who  decline  to 
interest  themselves  in  the  foreign  missionary 
enterprise,  pleading  that  there  is  so  much  to  do 
at  home.     I  am  rather  surprised  to  hear  him  say 


THE  HOME  PRINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    83 

that,  for  I  had  supposed  that  sort  of  people  had 
disappeared  or  had  learned  some  other  excuse. 
I  do  not  meet  them  any  more.  Such  have  never 
really  helped  on  the  home  missionary  enterprise 
with  all  of  their  professed  eagerness.  Their 
solicitude  for  the  home  cause  is  only  an  excuse, 
and  usually  a  cloak  of  selfishness.  This  principle 
which  I  seek  to  set  forth  is  vital  for  missions 
irrespective  of  the  accident  of  its  locality.  It  is 
that  without  which  missions  anywhere  lose  their 
meaning  and  become  vapid  and  ineffective. 

This  will  partially  illustrate  what  I  mean.  A 
while  ago  I  visited  a  town  where  the  church  was 
making  a  great  showing  of  missionary  interest 
and  activity.  The  elaborately  organized  socie- 
ties were  going  through  the  customary  motions 
with  irreproachable  precision.  Missionary  funds 
were  not  lacking.  Men  and  women  were  banded 
together  to  give  regularly  and  systematically  in 
the  support  of  an  enterprise  in  Persia  or  some- 
where else  safely  on  the  other  side  of  the  globe. 
Their  so-called  home  missionary  enterprise  was 
actually  a  thinly  disguised  imitation  of  their  for- 
eign and  was  safely  established  in  some  remote 
section  of  our  vast  national  domain.  Altogether 
the  Church  bears  a  flattering  reputation  for  mis- 
sionary zeal.  In  the  course  of  a  conversation 
with  one  of  the  most  faithful  workers  in  their 
widely  extended  activities  I  chanced  to  comment 
upon  the  evidence  of  the  rapid  growth  of  their 
own  town,  and  asked  if  my  impressions  were  not 
correct.    She  responded  with  quite  a  distinct 


84  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

sigh,  "Oh,  yes,  large  numbers  of  people  are 
moving  into  the  town,  but,  you  know,  they  are 
not  the  sort  who  take  to  the  Church."  And  that 
was  all.  It  was  then  time  to  change  the  subject. 
What  the  Church  is  trying  to  do  is  wholesome 
for  and  desperately  needed  by  the  people  away 
off  somewhere,  but  the  people  who  are  moving 
into  our  town : — it  closes  the  discussion  to  dis- 
cover that  they  do  not  take  to  the  Church.  It 
seems  not  to  have  occurred  to  us  that  the  Church 
might  take  to  them,  and  that,  at  last,  the  very 
essence  of  the  missionary  enterprise  is  in  making 
the  Church  do  that  very  thing. 

The  home  principle  is  absolutely  essential  in 
missions  to  redeem  them  from  artificiality.  There 
is  a  deep  and  ineradicable  insincerity  in  foisting 
upon  some  other  community  what  proves  insuffi- 
cient and  ineffective  in  our  own.  Why  should 
we  proclaim  with  an  inflated  zeal  to  a  community 
fifteen  hundred  or  fifteen  thousand  miles  away  a 
gospel  which  is  disregarded  if  not  tacitly  repudi- 
ated in  our  own  community  1  One  is  sometimes 
led  to  wonder  if  much  of  the  apathy  in  the  mis- 
sionary cause  is  not  after  all  prompted  by  a  kind- 
hearted  unwillingness  to  inflict  upon  other  people 
an  institution  which  in  the  case  of  their  own 
church  is  proving  so  deplorable  a  failure.  A 
church  which  is  not  gripping  the  life  of  its  own 
community  and  is  not  preaching  and  working  out 
a  gospel  which  renovates  the  life  immediately 
about  must  always  make  a  poor  success  of  bear- 
ing an  effective  gospel  message  to  communities  in 


THE  HOME  PRINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    85 

the  distance.  The  palpable  insincerity  of  a  pro- 
gramme which  encourages  or  permits  such  a 
travesty  must  always  cripple  any  enterprise. 
Surely  such  insincerity  and  artificiality  can 
never  fit  into  a  system  which  calls  itself 
Christian,  and  presumes  to  draw  its  inspiration 
from  Him  who  poured  forth  His  scorn  upon 
pretense. 

This  and  this  alone  will  make  the  missionary  en- 
terprise invincible  :  the  conviction  that  we  have 
got  a  good  thing,  and  then  the  enthusiasm  of  pass- 
ing it  on  to  others.  Without  that  enthusiasm 
missions  will  prove  too  vapid  and  flatulent  to  be 
worthy  of  serious  concern.  First,  and  absolutely 
essential  is  the  conviction  that  we  have  got  a  good 
thing.  A  church  which  is  not  gripping  the  life 
of  its  own  community  is  simply  bluf&ng,  however 
zealous  it  may  be  in  sending  to  the  uttermost 
parts.  An  unsaved  America  zealously  saving 
the  nations  beyond  the  seas,  simply  shows  its  in- 
capacity even  to  comprehend  the  saving  mission 
for  anybody.  A  programme  which  permits  a  so- 
called  missionary  church  to  welter  in  the  reek  of 
its  own  community's  moral  disease  cheapens  dis- 
tressingly the  gospel  it  presumes  to  preach,  and 
at  the  same  time  casts  disgraceful  reflections  upon 
the  distant  community  to  which  it  presumes  to 
bear  its  gospel  message.  Such  a  church  as  much 
as  announces.  Here  is  something  which  will  do  you 
poor  folks  a  lot  of  good.  To  be  sure,  it  is  not  do- 
ing us  much  good ;  we  are  not  successful  in  mak- 
ing it  work,  but  it  will  serve  for  you,  at  any  rate. 


86  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

It  is  to  save  any  church  from  such  a  ridiculous 
and  humiliating  predicament  that  what  I  call  the 
home  principle  in  missions  intervenes. 

There  is  no  call  for  the  discussion  of  the  propo- 
sition, Are  we  advancing  or  retrograding  f  As 
for  that,  of  course  we  are  advancing  ;  that  is  the 
way  God  has  of  running  things  in  this  world,  for 
the  most  part.  One  need  not  turn  pessimist  to 
discover  a  solicitude  over  the  conditions  of  our 
Church  life.  Statistics  demonstrate  that  there 
are  more  church-members  in  this  country  to-day 
than  there  have  ever  been  before,  and  those  of  us 
who  are  seeking  the  satisfaction  of  being  apprized 
of  that  fact  are  welcome  to  all  the  satisfaction  to 
be  got  from  it.  But  if  there  is  any  one  who  has 
given  our  Church  problems  an  intelligent  and 
sympathetic  study  and  is  satisfied  with  what  he 
finds,  I  have  yet  to  meet  him.  On  the  contrary 
there  comes  up  from  every  quarter  the  lament 
that  the  Church  has  lost  its  grip  upon  the  life  of 
our  times  and  our  society.  I  do  not  pretend  to 
say  how  much  ground  there  may  be  for  the  la- 
ment, nor  how  much  truth  there  may  be  in  the 
assertion.  I  am  sure,  however,  that  nothing  will 
be  gained  by  taking  out  our  chagrin  in  lamenta- 
tions. The  Church  has  no  business  losing  its 
grip  on  its  own  life  and  its  own  times.  Just  in 
so  far  as  a  church  does  that,  does  it  reveal  its  in- 
capacity for  the  real  mission  business.  Some- 
times a  church  or  an  individual  is  galvanized 
into  what  seems  life  by  a  missionary  zeal  though 
disregarding  this  demand  for  the  close  grip,  but 


THE  HOME  PEINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    87 

such  a  life  is  only  seeming  and  is,  of  real  spiritual 
power,  forceless. 

Perhaps  the  most  common  plaint  taking  a  con- 
crete form  under  this  head  is  the  oft-expressed 
desire  that  we  might  get  back  to  the  old  ways, 
the  old  zeal  for  religion,  the  old  gospel,  as  it  is 
often  phrased.  I  passed  a  tent  the  other  day, 
where  evangelistic  services  were  being  held, 
which  was  placarded  in  large  letters  with  such 
legends  as  these  :  The  old  Bible.  The  old  Faith. 
Come  in  and  hear  the  old  gospel  preached  in  the 
old  way.  I  suppose  the  song  most  commonly 
sung  was  ^'The  old-time  religion's  good  enough 
for  me."  Such  inducements  were  presumably  of- 
fered to  attract  people  in.  As  a  matter  of  fact 
there  were  very  few  attracted. 

Now,  our  age  is  supposed  by  many  to  have 
gone  daft  upon  the  new  and  the  fantastic,  is  con- 
sidered to  have  developed  an  inordinate  and  dis- 
eased passion  for  the  latest- out  and  the  bizarre. 
In  my  opinion  such  a  judgment  is  exceedingly 
superficial,  and  comes  of  a  superficial  reading  of 
the  signs  of  our  times  and  the  ways  of  our  age. 
Surely  there  never  was  a  time  when  flimsiness  in 
the  latest-out  so  quickly  cheapened  it,  when  the 
fantastic  and  the  bizarre  so  speedily  ceased  to 
satisfy.  It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  antiquity 
has  a  monopoly  on  religion.  I  venture  to  believe 
that  there  never  was  a  time  in  the  history  of  the 
world  nor  is  there  anywhere  a  people  where  the 
agencies  of  religion  have  had  so  superb  a  chance 
as  in  our  day  and  among  the  American  people. 


S8       missio:n^s  steikikg  home 

Eeligion? — why,  religion  bursts  from  the  pores 
of  the  American  people.  They  make  creeds 
while  they  wait  on  the  corners  and  talk  Bibles  as 
they  hurry  down  the  street.  They  do  it  very  un- 
intelligently,  but  they  would  be  doing  so  intelli- 
gently and  wholesomely  if  somebody  would  tell 
them  how.  Their  religion  is,  to  be  sure,  in  a 
terrible  bungle,  but  that  is  perhaps  not  altogether 
their  fault.  It  is  not  surprising  perhaps  that 
those  who  are  tenacious  of  the  precise  old  forms 
of  religion  should  be  dissatisfied  with  the  pros- 
pect, and  should  feel  that  religion  has  failed  and 
lost  its  hold  upon  the  American  consciousness. 
That  is  a  vain,  and  almost  comical  lament.  Ee- 
ligion  will  never  fail  or  lose  its  vitality.  And  no 
church  ever  had  a  finer  chance  than  has  our 
American  Church  in  its  own  day  and  among  its 
own  people. 

Some  are  pining  for  a  return  to  Apostolic  tri- 
umphs and  conditions.  If  we  only  had  the  Apos- 
tles back  among  us  !  To  do  what,  pray  ?  Why, 
if  the  Apostle  Paul  were  to  drop  in  among  us 
to-day  he  would  have  to  learn  his  business  all 
over  again.  An  Asia  Minor  ministry  would  not 
touch  our  problems.  I  believe  Paul  would  be 
equal  to  the  prodigious  task  of  learning  his  busi- 
ness all  over  again,  since  that  was  the  sort  of 
man  he  was.  And  I  confess  I  sometimes  wish  he 
might  happen  along.  I  should  enjoy  witnessing 
that  spectacle.  How  surprised  the  good  man 
would  be  to  find  what  he  is  sometimes  made 
sponsor  for,  the  reactionary  methods  and  the 


THE  HOME  PRmCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    89 

impossible  notions  for  which  he  has  been  made 
to  stand.  The  manner  and  the  language  in  which 
he  would  defend  his  good  name  and  repudiate 
the  imputations  would  be  a  sight  to  see  and 
oratory  to  hear.  If  there  was  anything  for  which 
the  Apostle  Paul  did  stand  it  was  for  carrying 
the  gospel  into  the  very  heart  of  the  life  of  his 
time,  and  no  one  would  be  quicker  than  he  to 
see  how  impossible  would  be  the  methods  he 
chose  in  the  vitally  different  conditions  of  to-day. 
Yes,  I  should  like  to  see  the  Apostle  Paul  drop 
in  among  us,  merely  for  the  fun  of  it,  if  for  noth- 
ing else.  I  should  enjoy  witnessing  the  vehe- 
mence with  which  he  would  set  about  convincing 
us  of  the  fruitlessness  and  the  folly  of  pining  for 
his  old  Apostolic  ways. 

It  always  hurts  me,  and,  I  must  add,  though  I 
hope  in  a  wholly  Christian  way,  it  often  greatly 
angers  me,  to  hear  the  word  "modern''  spoken 
with  a  sneer.  I  am  a  modern  ;  I  live  in  modern 
times  ;  I  belong  to  my  age  and  my  age  belongs  to 
me.  This  is  God's  age ;  He  has  set  it  in  the 
midst  of  His  eternities ;  He  has  moulded  it  by  a 
matchless  wisdom  ;  He  has  crammed  it  with  in- 
comparable potencies ;  He  is  leading  men  into 
new  visions  of  Him,  of  His  grace  and  of  His 
power.  God  and  I  do  not  like  to  have  men  curl 
their  lips  and  speak  of  our  age  with  a  sneer.  I 
do  not  believe  God  means  we  shall  be  perpetually 
harking  back  ;  I  am  confident  He  means  we  shall 
be  striding  forward.  New  things  and  new  ideas 
are  not  per  se  bad,  and  by  the  virtue  of  their 


90  MISSIONS  STRIKII^G  HOME 

newness  to  be  condemned  and  sneered  at.  On 
the  contrary  there  is  a  presumption  in  their  fa- 
vour by  virtue  of  their  newness.  They  deserve 
to  be  accepted  as  good  until  they  are  demon- 
strated to  be  the  opposite.  The  very  fact  that 
they  have  superseded  some  old  thing  or  notion 
entitles  them,  until  they  show  their  insufficiency, 
to  the  respect  of  being  considered  the  best.  To 
say  that  a  thing  or  a  method  or  an  idea  is  mod- 
ern ought  to  be  a  passport  to  honour. 

Perhaps  some  will  suppose  that  I  am  getting 
ready  to  exploit  or  approve  some  fancy  and 
hifalutin  method  of  church  enterprise.  I  wish 
there  were  time  to  do  the  subject  full  justice 
in  assuring  you  that  I  am  not.  Nothing  of  the 
sort  is  necessary  to  carry  the  point  at  issue.  In- 
deed my  age  and  your  age,  our  modern  age 
would  repudiate  the  attempt.  If  there  is  any 
church  worker  who  does  not  know  the  folly  of 
trying  hifalutin  and  bizarre  methods  on  this  age 
and  the  American  people,  only  let  him  make 
the  experiment.  There  is  nothing  which  our  age 
has  so  clearly  demonstrated  than  that  cheap, 
sensational  devices  for  making  the  kingdom  of 
God  a  reality  do  not  work.  The  church  which 
turns  itself  into  a  dancing  school  or  a  rafling 
agency  simply  does  not  know  its  business,  and 
there  is  nothing  our  modern  age  delights  more  in 
doing  than  in  telling  it  so.  The  only  reason  our 
age  accords  even  tolerance  to  some  church  meth- 
ods which  many  bewildered  people  think  to  be 
so  promising  is  because  it  recognizes  the  sincere 


THE  HOME  PEI:N^CIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    91 

purpose  back  of  the  ill-considered  and  bungling 
ways.  The  deeper  consciousness  of  the  age 
knows  well  enough  that  a  lot  of  our  elaborate 
institutionalism  is  only  lumber,  not  capable  of 
being  worked  up  into  a  construction  of  perma- 
nent value,  and  it  is  alone  the  evidence  of  a  sin- 
cere desire  to  get  something  done  which  insures 
for  it  even  a  modicum  of  respect.  I  have  not 
been  getting  ready  to  advocate  any  new-fangled 
method  guaranteed  out  of  hand  to  solve  all  the 
problems  of  our  modern  church  life. 

But  this  I  have  been  getting  ready  to  say : 
That  a  church  which  does  not  know  its  own  age, 
whose  heart  does  not  throb  in  a  deep  and  con- 
stant sympathy  with  its  own  age,  which  does  not 
believe  unfalteringly  and  invincibly  in  the  eternal 
religious  responsiveness  of  the  heart  of  its  own 
age,  which  cannot  frame  its  message  in  such 
language  that  its  age  will  hearken  and  go  on  its 
way  with  a  deepening  joy,  which  does  not  speak 
for  God  to  its  own  age  and  whose  age  does  not 
recognize  God^s  message  in  its  speech, — a  church 
which  cannot  and  does  not  do  all  that  has  no 
worthy  title  to  the  distinction  of  being  mission- 
ary, and  apparent  missionary  activity  is  only 
the  semblance,  lacking  the  vitality  of  the  real 
thing. 

Money  will  never  do  the  missionary  business, 
neither  fifty  cents  per  member,  nor  five  dollars 
per  member  nor  five  thousand  per  member, 
though  it  be  forthcoming  every  year  till  the  end 
of  time.     Dollars  may  only  blind  our  eyes  to  the 


? 

I  92  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

real  demand.  Money  is  about  the  cheapest  and 
most  abundant  commodity  of  our  times.  If 
money  would  do  the  business  the  world  could  be 
saved  by  to-morrow  night.  Aye  !  I  was  about 
to  say,  it  would  be.  I  believe  it.  If  men  who 
I  have  the  money  could  be  made  really  to  believe 
I  that  money  would  do  the  business  the  thing 
would  be  done.  Neither  will  the  missionary 
enterprise  be  achieved  either  by  sighing  inar- 
ticulately for  a  spiritual  awakening.  What 
some  people  mean  by  the  spiritual  quickening 
in  the  church  for  which  they  so  fervently  pray 
is  quite  what  the  church  does  not  need.  What 
the  church  does  need  is  the  readiness  to  take 

1  hold,  to  take  itself  seriously  as  the  ambassador 
of  God  to  this  age,  not  a  made-to-order  age,  but 
this  age ;  not  some  people  of  antiquity  or  of  futur- 
ity, but  these  people  ;  to  be  confident,  almightily, 
eternally,  invincibly  confident  that  this  age,  these 
people  need  God,  want  God,  are  searching  for 
God  in  their  blindness,  are  weltering  in  their  sin, 

1  moaning  for  God,  and  then  like  those  God  has 
^  inspired  with  His  own  commission  convey  that 
message  to  people  who  are  languishing  for  it. 
Here  is  not  an  occasion  for  indirections,  and 
spiritual  incantations  ;  it  is  a  plain  demand  for 
inspiration  which  goes  straight  to  the  heart,  a 
sanctified  ingenuity  in  finding  out  what  is  to  be 
done,  and  then  a  hearty,  exuberant  doing  that. 

\The  spiritual  conquest  of  our  age  and  of  our 
American  life  is  not  a  problem ;  it  is  out  and  out 
an  inspiration  and  then  an  achievement. 


THE  HOME  PEINCIPLE  IN  MISSIONS    93 

All  who  are  interested  in  the  missionary  enter- 
prise are  sure  that  it  depends  vitally  upon  prayer. 
True,  to  be  sure.  And  prayer  will  not  be  failing. 
An  inspired  and  achieving  church  will  not  slight 
the  praying.  Their  every  exultant  breath  will  be 
a  prayer.  The  apostolic  idea  will  at  last  be  real- 
ized and  there  will  be  prayer  without  ceasing. 
The  ministry  of  such  a  church  will  itself  be  the 
utmost  sublimity  of  prayer. 

It  is  often  my  business  to  plead  for  the  support 
of  a  missionary  agency  which  gains  head  and 
makes  progress  every  day  by  the  inflow  of 
money.  When  that  flow  fails,  it  fails.  There 
must  pour  into  its  treasury  alone  this  fiscal  year 
one  million,  one  hundred  thousand  dollars  or  it 
has  failed,  the  missionary  cause  has  been  stag- 
gered by  the  blow.  Does  any  one  suppose  I  am 
not  solicitous  for  the  money  of  the  missionary 
cause  ?  But  I  am  willing  to  trust  the  missionary 
cause  for  its  financial  backing  to  a  church  which 
is  gripping  the  life  of  its  own  times  and  its 
own  community.  And  the  truth  is,  a  broadening 
experience  makes  me  tremble  for  the  cause  when 
committed  to  any  other  kind  of  a  church.  It  is 
my  business  among  other  pleas  to  put  in  an  im- 
portunate word  for  the  poor  Indian  and  the  neg- 
lected mountaineer,  the  frontiersman  and  the 
distant  outcast.  But  I  will  risk  that  plea  before 
a  church  which  is  sure  it  has  found  a  good  thing 
for  its  own  community  and  has  found  it  will  work 
to  the  redemption  of  the  life  of  its  own  people. 
That  is  just  the  sort  of  church  I  am  hunting  for 


94  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 


/  to  talk  missions  to.  A  genuinely  efficient  churcli 
in  its  own  community  is  bound  to  be  a  mission- 
ary force,  and  no  artificial  forcing  of  artificial 

'  fervour  will  be  needed  to  make  it  that.  I  ven- 
tured to  say  something  like  this  to  a  gathering  of 
churchmen  not  long  ago,  and  afterwards  the  pas- 
tor warmly  assured  me  that  I  was  right,  that  the 
truth  had  been  demonstrated  in  his  own  church. 
A  church  which  has  not  its  own  conscience  clean 
can  never  be  a  world-saving  force.  Missionary 
power  is  an  overflow ;  nothing  can  stop  it  once 

\  it  has  back  of  it  the  divine  impetus  of  conviction 

\  and  the  grace  of  demonstration.  A  moral 
earnestness  which  is  above  all  else  sincere  and 
does  not  dodge  the  direct  issues  of  the  redeeming 
mission  is  the  only  missionary  equipment  which 
will  do  the  business.  And  that  will  do  it. 
That  power  will  save  the  world,  for  it  is  God^s 
power. 


VI 

THE  KEFLEX  OP  MISSIONS 
A  Paper — A  Critique 

It  is  commonly  maintained  that  missions  to 
the  distance  reflect  upon  the  life  of  the  Church  at 
home.  One  of  the  arguments  most  often  ad- 
vanced for  missions  is  the  invigoration  of  the 
home  life  of  the  Church  which  is  sure  to  issue 
from  activity  abroad.  And  the  point  is  well 
taken.  The  reflex  of  missions  is  to  be  reckoned 
with.  Missions  have  a  double  interest.  This 
much  is  true,  at  any  rate,  that  the  state  of  the 
home  Church  is  the  accurate  index  of  the  ef- 
ficiency and  wholesomeness  of  its  missionary 
activity. 

The  principle  involved  finds  its  clearest  em- 
bodiment in  the  statemenfc  last  made.  The  point 
*  is  well  taken,  but  the  real  point  must  not  be 
missed.  ^  There  is  an  immediate  connection  be- 
tween the  life  of  a  church  or  of  a  people,  and 
their  ministries.  There  is  that  scattereth  and 
yet  increaseth.  Bread  cast  upon  the  waters  will 
return  after  many  days ;  and  in  our  bustling 
times  it  is  perhaps  not  unreasonable  to  expect  the 
return  after  a  few  days.  The  modern  reality 
often  goes  the  ancient  proverb  one  or  two  better. 

But  in  the  application  of  the  law  of  the  reflex 
in  missions,  it  makes  all  the  difference  in  the 
world  what  sort  of  missionary  activity  is  prose- 

95 


96  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

cuted.  Unwholesome  missionary  activity  re- 
flects upon  a  church  unwholesomely.  The  law 
operates  inexorably ;  the  principle  sometimes 
seems  to  hold  too  firmly.  The  soundness  of  the 
principle  is  the  more  apparent  when  the  terms 
of  the  statement  are  turned  about :  an  unwhole- 
some church  life  cannot  prosecute  wholesome 
missionary  activity.  Sweet  waters  do  not  issue 
from  a  bitter  fountain.  There  are  numerous  prov- 
erbs to  illuminate  this  putting  of  the  proposition. 

The  notion  often  prevails  that  a  dead  church 
can  galvanize  itself  into  life  by  turning  fussily 
missionary.  And  so  it  can — galvanize  itself. 
But  galvanism  only  sets  the  muscles  to  twitch- 
ing. The  appearances  may  easily  delude  the 
onlooker ;  there  may  be  no  real  life.  A  little 
poking  and  prodding  may  keep  the  tail  of  a 
dead  snake  wiggling  "tiU  the  sun  goes  down.'^ 

A  mission  to  the  antipodes  is  in  itself  no 
panacea  for  the  spiritual  ills  of  the  American 
Church  or  the  American  Eepublic.  Our  mis- 
sionary enterprise  shows  some  evidence  of  con- 
fusion at  this  point.  Missionary  arguments 
would  often  make  it  appear  that  the  delusions 
were  being  entertained,  and  that  we  were  confi- 
dent of  our  calling  and  election  at  home  through 
our  activities  abroad.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it 
would  be  an  astonishing  reversal  of  the  proprie- 
ties both  of  logic  and  of  grace,  for  a  church  to 
expect  its  missionary  activities  in  the  distance  to 
work  out  its  own  home  salvation.  The  impetus 
and  incentive  are  got  from  the  wrong  quarter  j 


THE  EEFLEX  OP  MISSIONS  97 

cause  and  effect  are  transposed ;  tlie  cart  is  got 
before  the  horse. 

The  only  process  by  which  life  can  be  put  into 
a  dead  church  or  into  the  spiritual  life  of  a  peo- 
ple, is  for  the  church  or  the  people  to  get  born 
and  actually  to  set  about  living, — and  the  process 
of  living  is  not  summarily  comprehended  in 
mooning  the  horizon.  Missionary  activity  is  an 
index  of  a  church's  life,  is  not  the  thing  itself, 
and  can  create  the  real  thing  only  as  exercise 
contributes  to  the  more  exuberant  life  of  a  healthy 
organism.  Oftentimes  exercise  is  the  most  dead- 
ening liberty  which  a  half- dead  man  can  indulge. 
It  depends  entirely  upon  the  nature  of  the  malady. 
Activity  sprung  from  an  artificial  stimulus  often 
hastens  the  process  of  dissolution  in  the  organism, 
rather  than  infuses  real  life.  Sacrifice  for  others 
is  the  noblest  virtue,  human  or  divine,  and  the 
practice  feeds  the  passion.  But  all  which  as- 
sumes the  garb  is  not  sacrifice,  and  assuming  the 
semblance  of  virtue  is  often  the  surest  blight  of 
character. 

The  large  writ  of  history  is  instructive,  though 
the  text  is  far  too  voluminous  for  the  reading  of 
even  the  large  print  under  this  title.  But  each 
reader  doubtless  has  in  mind  some  outstanding 
instructive  chapters. 

Syria  was  once  the  seat  and  centre  of  mission- 
ary activity.  The  cataclysms,  which  have  rolled 
over  and  left  Syria  the  debilitated  spiritual  de- 
pendency it  is  to-day,  have  been  very  various. 
Some  of  them  have  involved  world  movementa 


98  MISSIOl!^S  STEIKING  HOME 

which,  it  might  be  esteemed,  Syria,  with  what- 
ever spiritual  vigour  it  might  have  mustered, 
would  have  been  impotent  to  control.  But  Syria 
is  to-day  one  of  the  neediest  of  the  lands  which 
lie  in  spiritual  darkness.  Genuine  and  com- 
pletely wholesome  spiritual  forces  survive  even 
such  cataclysms  as  the  break  up  of  the  Eoman 
dominion  or  the  overflow  of  Saracenic  conquest. 
Yet  Syria's  spiritual  forces  were  not  proof  against 
such  shocks.  There  is  much  evidence  that  Syria 
did  not  purify  her  own  spiritual  life  even  through 
her  missionary  activity,  but,  parallel  with  it,  she 
was  weakened  by  false  emphasis  in  her  interpre- 
tations and  absorption  in  non-essentials,  if  not  in 
positive  errors,  until  the  inward  decay  of  her  own 
Christianity  was  in  itself  one  of  the  potent  in- 
fluences of  her  degradation. 

Northern  Africa  stands  forth  in  the  light  of  the 
present  thought.  Few  sections  of  the  Christian 
Church  and  few  epochs  of  Christian  grace  have 
revealed  so  aggressive  missionary  activity  as  did 
Northern  Africa  in  the  early  Christian  centuries. 
Africa  is  pretty  dark  all  over  to-day,  except 
where  Nineteenth  and  Twentieth  century  agen- 
cies have  let  in  the  light.  It  may  be  insisted  that 
politics  meddled  here  also,  as  they  did  in  the  case 
of  Syria.  But  politics  everywhere  and  always 
have  a  way  of  meddling,  and  if  spiritual  forces 
cannot  reckon  in  the  interferences  of  politics  and 
still  win  conquests,  such  forces  are  too  weak  to 
deserve  serious  acknowledgment  among  the  ele- 
ments which  live  and  move  in  the  world,     The 


THE  KEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS  99 

story  of  North  African  missionary  activity  is  not 
a  chapter  of  wholesome  spiritual  development. 
It  rather  reads  to  the  contrary  effect. 

Such  instances  are  musty  with  age,  and  may 
be  thought  to  lack  meaning  for  to-day.  All  of 
to-day  is  before  us,  and  there  perhaps  do  not  fail 
more  striking  instances  still,  in  more  modern 
times,  of  the  break-down  of  the  missionary  '^re- 
flex," as  a  regenerating  force. 

The  Moravian  Church  is  a  church  of  a  thrilling 
career,  as  its  history  has  often  with  some  justice 
been  interpreted.  Indeed,  it  is  the  touchstone 
by  which  missionary  excellence  has  perhaps  most 
often  of  late  been  tested.  Almost  all  of  our  mis- 
sionary audiences  have  listened  with  rising  en- 
thusiasm to  the  statistics  of  its  wonderful  mis- 
sionary propaganda.  The  fact  is  often  pointed 
out  as  an  evidence  of  the  Church's  devotion  that 
it  has  more  members  and  ministers  abroad  than 
it  has  at  home.  I  have  not  taken  the  trouble  to 
verify  this  statement,  since  the  detail  is  of  no 
great  importance, 

I  suppose  there  are  few  of  us  who  know  any- 
thing of  Moravia  beyond  the  cyclopedia  an- 
nouncements, of  its  comprising  a  territory  of 
eighty-five  hundred  square  miles,  and  such  other 
slightly  interesting  details.  I  confess  that  my 
knowledge  of  its  spiritual  condition  is  exceed- 
ingly meagre.  The  most  vivid  impressions  come 
from  the  letters  of  a  friend  who  has  gone  to  the 
country  to  do  missionary  work  after  the  comple- 
tion of  his  training  in  America.     His  reports  cer- 


100         MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 

tainly  reveal  great  need.  The  country  is  said  to 
be,  by  large  predominance,  Romanist,  and  the 
Protestant  population  quite  inconsiderable  by 
comparison  of  numbers. 

It  is  well  known  that  Moravia  and  Bohemia 
have  contributed  to  our  American  population 
some  of  the  most  bitter  "infidels^'  who  have  ever 
defiled  the  speech  and  literature  of  a  Christian 
people.  Indeed,  but  for  such  "nests"  as  that  in 
Chicago,  inhabited  by  this  class  of  immigrants, 
blatant  "infidelity'^  is  practically  unknown  in 
the  United  States. 

Of  course  it  is  unreasonable  to  hold  the  Mo- 
ravian Church  accountable  for  such  facts  and  con- 
ditions,— except  on  the  principle  of  the  mission- 
ary *  ^  reflex. ' '  The  Moravian  Church  has  achieved 
some  remarkable  and  very  gratifying  results  in 
this  country,  since  its  implanting  here  more  than 
a  century  and  a  half  ago.  But  the  reaction  of  its 
foreign  propaganda  upon  the  parent  Church  and 
upon  the  spiritual  conditions  of  Moravia  have 
certainly  not  been  remarkable, — at  least  not  re- 
markably wholesome.  It  is  a  question  whether 
we  are  justified  in  setting  forth  its  missionary 
achievements  with  the  enthusiasm  which  we 
usually  discover,  when  the  spiritual  condition 
of  Moravia  remains  what  it  is  to-day.  If  the 
Moravian  Church  abroad  still  claims  its  parent- 
age from  the  native  Moravian  Church,  and  if  the 
missionary  reactions  count  for  anything,  is  it  not 
rather  a  demonstration  of  weakness  than  of 
strength,  that  the  conquests  should  have  been  more 


THE  BEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS         101 

noteworthy  in  the  easier  fields  abroad,  than  in  the 
stagnant  spiritual  life  of  the  mother  country  ? 

It  might  seem  invidious  to  make  example  of 
any  of  our  American  churches,  and  the  detailing 
of  facts  and  conditions  might  seem  to  assume  the 
nature  of  controversy  for  no  worthy  purpose. 
Yet  time  enough  has  elapsed  even  here  to  demon- 
strate with  some  cogency  to  the  thoughtful,  the 
potency  of  the  ^^ reflex^'  upon  our  American 
churches.  It  must  not  have  escaped  the  attention 
of  those  most  eager  for  the  advancement  of  the 
kingdom,  that  the  denomination  of  our  American 
Church  which  has  often,  perhaps  usually,  been 
recognized  as  proportionately  the  most  forward 
in  the  foreign  propaganda,  is  proportionately, 
perhaps  actually,  dwindling  at  home.  Its  young 
people  are  deserting  it,  or  at  least  not  incorpor- 
ating themselves  actively  into  its  life,  and  in 
large  measure  the  denomination  is  recognized  by 
itself  and  by  others  as  most  conspicuously  an 
agency  of  protest  among  our  American  spiritual 
forces,  rather  than  an  aggressive  and  constructing 
agent. 

A  more  complete  analysis  of  this,  and  of  any 
other  case  like  it,  certainly  would  reveal  other 
causes  for  decadence  than  an  active  foreign  prop- 
aganda. Nobody  in  his  senses  believes  for  one 
moment  that  missionary  activity  abroad  is  in- 
consistent with  or  inimical  to  the  most  whole- 
some and  efficient  spiritual  enterprise  at  home. 
The  two  lines  of  activity  are  complements  of  each 
other.    The  point  at  issue  is  simply  the  testing  of 


102        MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 

the  potency  of  the  ^  ^  reflex.  ^  ^  It  must  appear  pos- 
sible, at  least  possible,  for  a  church  to  be  re- 
markably active  abroad  and  at  the  same  time  de- 
cline at  home. 

Such  cases  as  those  mentioned  hardly  manifest 
the  glory  of  the  '^  grain  of  wheat  thrust  into  the 
ground  to  die,"  from  whose  death  new  and  more 
life  is  attained.  In  the  case  of  the  deathless 
Death  which  gives  meaning  to  that  parable,  there 
was  the  prophetic  insight  which  made  self-renun- 
ciation voluntary,  hearty,  glad,  certainly  wholly 
conscious.  He  did  not  die  protesting,  but  rather 
conquering,  and  eternally  confident  of  His  victory. 

But  it  is  likely  that  none  of  these  instances, 
nor  the  process  of  thought  involved  in  setting 
them  in  array,  have  occurred  to  the  most  who 
discovered  the  alleged  potency  in  the  missionary 
*' reflex."  The  evidence  appears  in  the  individ- 
ual church  for  the  most  part,  and  I  have  been 
assured  by  more  persons  than  I  could  begin  to 
catalogue,  that  the  principle  works  infallibly  in 
the  individual  church.  Many  assert  that  they 
have  never  known  the  result  to  fail,  namely,  that 
a  church,  become  active  in  missionary  interest, 
should  quicken  and  enlarge  its  activities  at 
home.  It  has  come  to  be  the  commonly  accepted 
formula,  among  newly  installed  and  especially 
young  ministers,  for  waking  up  a  dead  church  : 
start  missionary  subscriptions,  organize  mission- 
ary societies,  arouse  the  people's  interest  in  the 
world-wide  movements.  Many  a  pastor  or  other 
is  thoroughly  convinced  by  the  demonstration  of 


THE  EEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS         103 

personal  experience  and  observation  tliat  here 
has  been  found  a  panacea  for  churchly  ills. 

To  deny  these  remarkable  and  cheering  phe* 
nomena,  which  each  one  of  us  has  seen  and  felt, 
would  be  idle  even  if  it  were  not  wicked.  But  a 
careful  analysis  of  the  facts  is  all  the  more  de- 
sirable and  needful,  by  the  very  reason  of  the 
enthusiasm  which  the  method  excites. 

I  have  a  friend  who  declares  in  public  well- 
nigh  every  day,  that  out  of  a  broad  experience, 
he  has  never  known  of  a  case,  where  increased 
giving  for  the  foreign  propaganda  has  not  been 
matched  by  an  increased  zeal  in  home  ministries 
at  the  same  time.  His  experience  has  been  dif- 
ferent from  mine,  or  else  he  has  peculiar  stand- 
ards by  which  comparisons  are  instituted.  I  am 
about  prepared  to  say  that  the  most  common 
method  I  know  of  to-day,  by  which  a  church 
draws  itself  away  from  the  homely  ministry  im- 
mediately at  hand  and  encloses  itself  in  an  imper- 
vious and  complacent  sheathing  of  aloofness,  is 
the  discovery  of  a  fussy  zeal  for  the  propaganda 
at  the  distance.  That  fussy  zeal  is  not  in  the 
last  analysis  missionary  activity,  to  be  sure,  but 
it  often  passes  for  it ;  too  few  carry  the  analysis 
to  ^Hhelast.^^ 

The  up-to-now  quite  prevalent  attitude  of  many 
of  our  missionary  churches  towards  the  foreigner, 
crowding  into  every  nook  and  cranny  of  our 
eastern  cities,  is  not  distant  illustration.  Some 
of  the  most  bitter  and  un-Christly  declamations 
against  the  foreigner  which  have  come  to  my 


104         MISSIONS  STEIKIKG  HOME 

ears,  have  come  out  of  the  mouths  of  men  and 
women,  who  have  the  reputation  for  being,  and 
who  actually  are,  untiring  in  their  zeal  for  the 
mission  to  the  antipodes.  It  is  no  indignity  to 
such  missionary  activity  to  say  that  it  is  fussy. 
And  its  ''reflex"  is  not  wholesome,  cannot  pos- 
sibly infuse  the  true  spiritual  tone  in  the  Churches 
ministries  of  the  close  encounter.  How  far  it 
reaUy  aids  the  mission  to  the  distance  the  future 
alone  will  demonstrate. 

It  does  not  make  to  the  present  point,  of  course, 
merely  to  direct  attention  to  the  shortcomings  of 
the  Church.  With  the  accumulated  results  of 
the  Church's  critics  before  us,  that  would  be 
simple  enough.  Our  senses  are  blunted  by  gen- 
eralities. Perhaps  even  the  generalities  are  not 
entirely  pointless,  however,  when  it  is  observed 
that  the  notorious  mal- adaptations  of  our  church 
life  to  the  demands  of  our  times,  have  appeared 
and  grown  more  and  more  notorious,  during  our 
most  remarkable  epoch  of  activity  abroad.  Our 
missionary  era  has  not  found  altogether  incon- 
sistent with  the  foreign  propaganda,  the  aliena- 
tion of  a  whole  class  like  the  labouring  people. 
The  Church's  mal-adjustment  to  the  conditions 
created  by  the  immigration  movements,  is  still  so 
common  as  to  constitute  itself  a  generality,  and 
gains  point,  in  the  present  connection,  by  the 
very  virtue  of  its  being  a  generality.  And  the 
fassiness  of  many  of  the  attempts  at  adjustment 
appear  in  the  persistence  with  which  the  mission 
to  the  foreigner  is  construed  as  a  "foreign"  mis- 


THE  KEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS         105 

sion,  in  the  diligence  we  so  often  use  to  treat  the 
late-comer  as  a  '^  foreigner.'^  Some,  even  of  the 
active  churches,  have  not  gotten  beyond  conduct- 
ing this  supremely  *'home''  mission  as  a  "for- 
eign" mission. 

Our  shortcomings  cease  to  be  generalities  and 
reveal  the  fallibility  of  the  '* reflex''  method, 
when  individual  churches  discover  no  inconsist- 
ency between  an  ardent  zeal  for  the  propaganda 
in  foreign  lands  and  a  practical  passivity  towards 
the  crowding  foreigner  in  the  community.  There 
are  such  individual  churches.  And  before  the 
glaring  inconsistency  shall  be  relieved,  there  will 
need  to  transpire  a  reformation  in  not  alone  the 
method  of  church  endeavour,  but  also  a  regener- 
ation of  the  spirit  which  actuates  it. 

The  reason  for  such  tendencies  is  not  far  to 
seek.  Now  that  the  Church's  ministry  to  the  dis- 
tance has  been  crystallized  into  a  ''system,"  that 
ministry  is  easier  and  simpler  than  the  ministry 
close  at  hand,  requiring,  in  these  piping  times 
of  progress,  an  exceedingly  agile  and  strenuous 
church  life.  A  church  which  really  keeps  abreast 
of  its  own  life  nowadays,  is  compelled, — to  em- 
ploy an  Hibernianism  and  a  vulgarism  rolled  into 
one — is  compelled  to  hustle  to  keep  up  with 
itself.  For  a  church  integrated  with  such  a 
throbbing  organism  as  is  our  American  life, 
growth  is  as  necessary  as  breath,  is  a  synonym 
for  existence.  And  growth  is  always  severely 
straining  business,  though  it  be  true  that  healthy 
growth  is  exuberant  and  glad  business. 


106  MISSIONS  STRIKING  HOME 

Now,  supporting  the  mission  to  the  distance, 
is  as  simple  as  writing  checks.  At  least  many 
an  individual  or  church  unconsciously  contents 
himself  or  itself  with  so  concluding.  There  is, 
for  example,  a  certain  city  where  the  Presbyterian 
churches,  to  make  the  illustration  specific,  are 
strongholds  of  missionary  endeavour,  so  far  as 
the  treasury  reports  and  other  evidence  show, 
and  where  no  new  Presbyterian  church  has  been 
added  to  the  force  while  the  city  has  extended  in 
broad  suburbs  and  one  hundred  thousand  people 
have  been  added  to  the  population.  Founding 
new  churches  in  growing  suburbs  is  often  diffi- 
cult and  delicate  business.  It  is  far  easier  to  fall 
into  the  ruts  of  the  old  churches,  filling  coffers 
fuller  and  fuller  with  benevolent  funds,  and  de- 
riving missionary  satisfaction  from  that  exercise. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  about  the  only  palpable 
and  active  participation  people  can  assume  in 
the  mission  to  the  distance,  is  contributing 
money  towards  it.  There  is  no  other  way  usually 
possible.  And  that  is  about  the  easiest  and 
simplest  process  in  the  whole  range  of  missionary 
activity.  Money  is  the  cheapest  thing  an  Amer- 
ican knows.  The  mission  to  the  distance  offers 
him,  therefore,  the  line  of  the  least  resistance, 
and  it  is  easy  to  satisfy  oneself  with  having  dis- 
charged one's  missionary  responsibility  by  fol- 
lowing that  line. 

On  the  face  it  is  plain,  and  experience  has 
abundantly  demonstrated  the  fact,  that  it  is  far 
easier  to  delegate  some  substitute  to  preach  the 


THE  EEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS         107 

gospel  in  Africa,  than  it  is  efficiently  to  grapple 
with  the  nasty  problem  of  the  negro  quarter  five 
or  ten  blocks  down  the  street.  For  eight  hundred 
or  a  thousand  dollars  per  annum,  any  church 
can  have  the  satisfaction  of  instituting  and  prose- 
cuting the  simpler  process ;  and  back  come  the 
letters  each  month  reporting  the  triumphs  of 
grace  through  that  church's  ministry.  There  is 
involved  in  the  method  no  strain  of  the  nerves, 
no  knitting  of  the  brows  over  problems,  no  dis- 
tressing discovery  that  cherished  plans  are  dismal 
failures,  nor  the  pain  and  confusion  of  correcting 
mistakes  by  beginning  all  over  again.  The  most 
of  these  strains  and  stresses,  which  are  real 
enough  where  the  work  is  being  done,  are  ob- 
scured in  the  periodic  reports,  in  which  the  mis- 
sionary church  finds  such  satisfying  spiritual 
reward,  or  else  the  recital  of  them  only  contrib- 
utes a  new  spice  to  the  romance  of  the  story. 
All  of  these  joys  in  the  work,  any  church  can 
gain  by  the  contribution  of  $800  or  $1,000.  The 
raising  of  such  a  sum,  in  spite  of  the  ado  which 
must  usually  attend  the  operation,  is  really  very 
simple  and  easy  for  the  average  American  con- 
gregation. 

But  the  immediate  grapple  with  the  problem 
of  the  negro  quarter  five  blocks  away  is  a  very 
different  proposition.  It  presents  a  situation  of 
such  delicacy  and  difficulty  as  to  make  it  well- 
nigh  impossible  even  to  hire  any  one,  at  any 
price,  who  will  give  satisfaction  in  performing  it. 
So  that  there  is  not  forthcoming  even  the  exhilara- 


108         MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

tion  of  contributing  money  to  ensure  the  work^s 
being  done.  Consequently  some  churches  have 
become  so  deadened  to  the  conditions,  that  the 
spiritual  incongruities  of  their  missionary  pro- 
gramme do  not  occur  to  them  ;  and  some  others, 
more  thoughtful,  have  philosophized  themselves 
into  the  contention,  and  the  contentment,  that 
the  problem  is  so  complicated  by  economic  and 
social  entanglements,  as  to  draw  it  out  of  the 
range  of  so  ^'purely  spiritual"  an  institution  as 
the  Church.  The  mission  to  the.  distance  in- 
volves none  of  these  complications,  or  at  least  the 
supporting  church  encounters  none  of  them.  It 
is  always  easier  to  pass  around  the  hat  or  keep 
the  subscription  list  moving,  than  it  is  to  adjust 
first  hand  the  ministries  of  grace  to  weak  and 
volatile  and  slippery  human  nature. 

There  is  nowhere  that  the  spiritual  test  is  so 
severe  as  it  is  right  here  in  this  maddening  Amer- 
ican rush  of  circumstance  and  swift  shifting  of 
spiritual  emphases ;  nowhere  that  sanctified  in- 
genuity and  quick  insights  upon  the  verities  are 
so  essential.  Even  those  who  are  personally  en- 
countering the  problems  in  the  mission  to  the 
distance,  are  not  always  appreciative  of  the  de- 
mands. Not  long  ago  I  heard  an  energetic  mis- 
sionary, who  has  achieved  a  notable  success  in  a 
distant  land,  stormily  assure  an  audience  of  peo- 
ple, that  what  the  American  Church  needs  for  the 
solution  of  its  present  day  problems,  is  *Hhe 
plain  preaching  of  the  pure  gospel."  He  came 
dangerously  near  pronouncing  the  word  "gos- 


THE  KEFLEX  OF  MISSIONS         109 

pill," — as  though,  indeed,  the  diagnosis  were  so 
simple,  and  a  ^^pill"  were  the  panacea.  More 
than  one  foreign  missionary,  compelled  to  return 
and  assume  the  duties  of  the  difficult  American 
ministry,  has  openly  expressed  his  longing  to 
get  abroad  again,  if  he  might,  to  the  less  compli- 
cated ministry  of  simpler  spiritual  exactions. 

The  spiritual  strain  upon  the  home  church  in 
its  home  ministry  is  often  intense  ;  it  is  always 
direct  and  can  never  be  delegated :  it  furnishes 
the  final  test  of  a  church's  spiritual  efficiency. 
This  in  short  is  the  reason  the  ^^  reflex"  of  mis- 
sionary activity  is  not  always  effective,  even  in 
appearance,  as  a  real  regenerating  force.  Some- 
times, perhaps  a  close  observation  will  justify 
saying  oftentimes,  a  church  can  muster  the  com- 
paratively slight  spiritual  vigour,  to  follow  the 
line  of  comparatively  slight  resistance,  when  that 
church  may  balk  at  the  more  difficult  exactions 
of  the  close  grapple  with  the  severe  and  compli- 
cated mission  at  the  door -step.  Here  is  revealed 
the  short-sightedness  and  unwisdom  of  accepting 
the  missionary  ^*  reflex"  as  an  infallibly  whole- 
some force  in  a  church's  life. 

The  truth  is  that  we  have  converted  an  effect 
into  a  cause.  Some  of  our  theories  contemplate 
the  regeneration  of  the  home  church  through  a 
foreign  mission.  If  our  theories  carry  us  no 
further,  we  shall  be  caught  in  a  distressing  and 
inexcusable  delusion.  The  ^ '  reflex ' '  has  no  such 
potency.  The  mission  to  the  distance  if  it  is 
genuine  and  wholesome,  is  an  effect;  it  must 


110  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

spring  from  a  life  in  the  Church,  which  transmits 
energy  as  steadily  and  as  inevitably  as  the  heart 
pumps  the  life-blood  into  the  healthy  organism. 
To  provide  for  the  infusion  of  blood  by  some  ar- 
tificial device,  from  a  source  outside  the  organ- 
ism, is  simply  to  protract  decay.  Her  foreign 
missions  will  never  save  the  American  Church ; 
under  the  normal  developments  of  her  life  the 
foreign  propaganda  will  be  rather  the  spon- 
taneous, inevitable  expression  of  her  inherent 
vitality.  If  it  shall  ever  transpire  that  the  ^'  evi- 
dences" appear  in  spite  of  unhealth,  the  case 
will  be  the  more  distressful,  since  the  appear- 
ances are  so  easily  capable  of  deceiving. 


VII 

THE  AMERICAN  ^*E  PLURIBUS  UNUM»» 
OF  GRACE 

People  are  the  most  interesting  things  in  the 
world,  and,  what  is  more  to  the  present  point, 
they  are  the  most  valuable.  All  other  things  are 
in  the  final  reckoning  mere  ciphers.  People  are 
the  only  real  figures.  A  row  of  ciphers  a  yard 
long  when  summed  up  amount  to  just  nothing. 
Ciphers  count  only  when  a  real  figure  is  placed 
before  them.  Things  are  of  value  only  when  at- 
tached to  and  reckoned  in  relationship  to  people. 
That  is  good  mathematics  and  good  philosophy 
and  it  is  certainly  good  religion. 

Now,  among  all  the  peoples  of  the  earth  there 
is  none  which  can  quite  compare,  in  your  estima- 
tion and  in  mine,  with  the  American  people. 
Not  that  they  are  better  than  anybody  else, — un- 
less they  just  are.  The  test  by  which  values  are 
measured,  is  that  of  serviceableness,  not  mere 
utility,  to  be  sure,  but  serviceableness.  Such  a 
test  is  not  crude  nor  artificial  nor  arbitrary.  We 
say,  and  we  say  truly,  that  God  is  no  respecter  of 
persons.  God  does  not  make  artificial  or  arbi- 
trary choices.  And  because  that  is  so  true  we 
may  reasonably  expect  God  to  adopt  in  His  deal- 
ings with  men  this  divinely  reasonable  standard. 
As  do  men,  so  does  He  apply  the  test  of  service- 
Ill 


112         MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

ableness  5  only  He  must  often  have  very  different 
notions  about  what  constitutes  serviceableness. 
But,  accepting  what  one  must  believe  is  God's 
standard  of  judgment,  it  need  not  appear  egotistic 
in  us  to  maintain  that  God  has  just  now  about  the 
biggest  and  broadest  and  most  eternally  impor- 
tant use  for  the  American  people  among  all  the 
peoples  upon  the  earth.  He  has  given  them  the 
finest  opportunities  to  do  the  things  most  worth 
while  for  the  whole  world  ;  has  put  them  in  a  po- 
sition where  what  they  say  and  what  they  do 
count  for  the  good  or  the  bad  of  the  whole  world  ; 
has  made  it  vital  to  the  interests  of  all  the  rest  of 
the  people  what  sort  of  people  they  are  and  how 
weU  prepared  they  are  to  do  their  part  in  the 
universal  economy.  There  is  nothing  in  aU  that 
to  become  egotistic  about.  The  swelled  head  is 
no  essential  feature  of  Americanism.  Indeed  it 
will  essentially  incapacitate  Americans  from  do- 
ing the  service  which  God  evidently  has  designed 
for  them.  The  situation  rather  suggests  being 
humble,  feeling  the  incomparable  responsibility 
and  getting  ready  in  the  fullest  degree  to  be  ser- 
viceable. 

A  great  deal  depends  upon  what  we  mean  by 
that  expression,  the  American  people.  It  is 
worth  while  putting  ourselves  at  some  pains  to 
reckon  up  who  all  and  what  all  are  included  in 
the  category.  Who  are  the  American  people! 
I  and  my  friends,  my  neighbours  and  their 
friends, — and  that  is  all,  if  we  are  bumptious 
enough  to  be  the  swelled -head  sort  of  Americans, 


^^EPLUEIBUS  UNUM"  OF  GEACE     113 

or  little  enough  to  be  jingo  Americans,  or  blind 
enough  not  to  see  what  service  God  means  to  put 
Americans  to.  To  guard  against  any  such  blind- 
ness or  littleness  or  bumptiousness,  it  is  well  to 
be  at  some  pains  to  analyze  that  composite, 
kaleidoscopic  idea  which  the  expression,  the 
American  people,  represents.  It  makes  a  great 
difference,  that  they  are  so  many,  and  it  perhaps 
makes  an  even  greater  difference,  as  God  reckons 
differences  that  they  are  so  various.  A  rough 
catalogue  of  them  will  help  us  to  understand  how 
true  it  is  that  God  is  no  respecter  of  persons.  To 
make  the  sweep  of  the  field  the  more  complete 
we  may  well  begin  farthest  away,  and  move  in, 
so  to  speak,  from  the  outer  edges  to  the  centre. 

There  are  the  Indians  off  there,    285,000  of   I 
them.     Some  of  us  may  have  forgotten  them,  or    | 
are  of  the  notion  that  they  do  not  count.     But 
there  they  are,  so  many,  and  they  are  growing 
no  fewer  all  the  time.     They  are  not  all  American 
citizens,  but  all  are  moving  in  that  direction. 
They  are  moving  by  the  way  of  amalgamation,  if 
one  will  take  reckoning  of  no  other  way.     In 
Oklahoma  there  are  100,000  of  them,  and  only.  ^ 
25,000  are  of  pure  blood.     If  you  like  that  figure ' 
of  speech,  it  will  do  to  say  that  they  are  being 
woven  into  the  warp  and  woof  of  Americanism. 
They  are  scattered  quite  over  the  whole  country,   l 
They  live  in  ISTew  York,  Pennsylvania,  the  new 
state  of  Oklahoma,  the  Dakotas  and  the  central 
north,  Idaho  and  the  northwest,  Arizona  and  the 
southwest,  Alaska.     The  government's  expendi- 


114       Missio:Krs  steiking  home 

ture  of  four  or  five  millions  annually  upon  their 
education,  and  well  about  ten  millions  a  year  on 
all  lines  of  service,  puts  them  on  the  cash  books, 
if  you  fancy  searching  for  them  there.  They 
have  considerable  money  of  their  own.  Indeed 
they  are  the  wealthiest  Americans  amongst  us. 
The  per  capita  personal  holdings  of  real  estate 
among  some  of  the  tribes  are  greater  than  through 
any  other  cross  section  of  our  population.  They 
are  no  longer  savage ;  none  dangerously  so. 
There  will  never  be  another  Indian  war,  not  even 

k,  a  skirmish.  Some  of  the  tribes  are  besotted. 
Yet  they  are  not  hopeless  pagans  nor  degenerates. 
Sane  educational  and  missionary  effort  has  al- 
ready demonstrated  capacities  which  demand  only 
more  and  better  of  the  same  treatment  to  insure 
their  ample  development.  The  spirit  which  made 
them  doughty  warriors  in  the  past  and  their  very 

'  capacity  for  far  extremes  of  vice  to-day,  only 
await    sancttfication  to  make  them  splendidly 

\  pure  and  forceful  in  the  reckonings  of  the  king- 

i  dom  of  God.  There  are  6,000  Presbyterians 
among  them,  I  have  reason  to  know,  and  some 
are  remarkably  fine  specimens  of  that  order. 

j  Two  hundred  and  eighty -five  thousand  Indians. 

I  There  are  some  American  people. 

Three  hundred  and  fifty  thousand  Mexicans. 
Call  them  American  Mexicans  to  distinguish 
them  from  the  Mexican  Mexicans  across  the 
Southern  boundary  of  our  national  domain.  Se- 
clusive,  suspicious  of  our  Americanism,  back- 
ward in  civilization.     Sired  of  the  Spaniard  of 


^^E  PLURIBUS  UNUM"  OF  GRACE    115 

Castile,  and  Cordova,  and  Madrid;  claiming  as 
mother  the  sisters  of  the  Montezumas  and  Aztecs 
of  ancient  glory.      Inheriting  vices,  doubtless, 
from  both  father  and  mother.     Awaiting  a  re-  f 
deeming  power  which  shall  bring  out  and  sane-  j 
tify  the  rich  virtues  of  both  father  and  mother.  K 
Needing  the  illumination  of  God's  truth  to  re-  \ 
deem  them  from  pagan  ignorance ;  needing  the  \ 
energy  of  a  Christly  redemption  to  lift  them  out 
of  their  shiftlessness  j  needing  the  large  liberty  of 
the  Sons  of  God  to  make  them  good  American  , 
citizens.     Needing  and  already  gaining  much  in 
that  line.     Needing  more  and  better  of  the  same. 
Three   hundred    and  fifty  thousand  Mexicans,   j 
There  are  more  Americans.  ' 

A  mountain  range   in  the  central  South  of   ] 
hitherto  such  peculiar  inaccessibility  as  to  con-    ■ 
stitute  itself  a  distinct  section  of  our  national 
domain.     Reached  now  to  a  limited  degree  by 
the  forces  of  the  industrial  awakening  and  gen- 
eral   rejuvenescence  of  the  South.     Extending 
from    near   the  Atlantic  seaboard  to  well-nigh 
the  centre   of   the  continent.     Inhabited  by  a 
million  and  a  half,  three  millions,  five  millions 
of  people  ;  estimate  them  few  or  many  according 
as  you  extend  the  section  westward.     That  many 
more  American  people ;  people  in  whose  veins  | 
courses  the  good  blood  of  the  covenanter  and  t 
cavalier.     The  purest  Anglo-Saxon  stock  on  the  ! 
continent.     Original  Americans,  if  the  Indians 
will  allow  them  the  use  of  the  term.     So  original 
indeed  as  to  have  remained  stagnant.     Many  of 


116  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

them  100  years  behind  the  times  in  the  material 
arts  of  civilization  ;  some  of  them  2,000  years  be- 
hind the  times  in  the  enlightening  benizons  of 
religion.  Yet  a  people  who  have  already  af- 
forded Church  and  State  many  of  the  finest,  stur- 
diest characters  and  most  illustrious  statesmen 
of  our  history,  and  who  have  many  more  of  the 
same  sort  to  furnish  for  the  going  after  them. 
,  The  mountaineers  of  the  South,  a  fine  lot  of  peo- 
I  pie,  several  millions  of  them.     More  American 

*  people. 

I     Mormons.     Shall  we  say  Mormon  Americans  t 

*  Yes,  they  are  that,  though  they  may  not  in  their 
present  disloyalty  altogether  fancy  being  called 
so.  A  whole  state  full,  and  other  states  going 
that  way.  One  of  their  statesmen  occupying  a 
seat  in  our  federal  congress,  and  since  the  recent 

\  action  of  the  United  States  Senate,  settling  down 
to  occupy  it  more  comfortably  still.  Multitudes 
of  people  so  far  deluded  as  to  support  a  rea<jtion- 
ary  hierarchic  despotism,  a  perpetual  clog  upon 
our  advancing  civilization,  an  alien  imperium  in 
imperio.  A  system  which  subsists  upon  ignorance 
if  not  upon  vice.     A  system  which  needs  only  the 

*  enlightenment  of  the  Mormon  people  themselves 
for  its  destraction ;  a  system  which  is  not  in  the 
last  analysis,  a  political  issue,  however  politics 
may  now  be  entangled,  but  is  rather  an  educa- 
tional issue,  and  an  opportunity  for  the  gospel  of 
the  great  Liberalizer,  and  Enlightener  of  men's 
lives.  A  state  full,  two  states,  three  states,  par- 
tially  filled   with   superstition-bound   Mormon 


"E  PLUEIBUS  UNUM^'  OF  GEACE    117 

people,  who,  once  unbound,  have  it  in  them  to  f 
become  the  flower  of  our  liberty-loving  American  j 
citizenship.     More  American  people. 

Negroes ;  ten  millions  of  them.  Presenting 
the  most  complicated  social  and  industrial  and 
moral  and  religious  problem  of  all  of  our  many. 
A  down-trodden  race,  yet  rising.  Eising  to  vio-  * 
lence  here  and  there.  Eising  also  to  nobler  ideals 
and  fuller  appreciation  of  their  rights  and  duties 
as  freemen.  Producing  an  increasing  number  of  J 
eminent  orators  and  educators  and  bankers  and 
men  of  letters.  Developing  a  remarkable  race 
pride,  in  spite  of  their  slave  history.  A'^hort 
time  ago  I  heard  him  who  is  often  styled  the 
Moses  of  the  race  declare  before  an  audience  of 
five  or  ten  thousand  people,  ''If  after  my  experi- 
ence in  living  the  human  life,  I  were  to  be  born 
again  upon  this  earth,  and  the  Great  Spirit  should 
offer  me  the  option  of  what  race  of  all  the  races  I 
should  choose  to  be  born  into,  I  should  say, 
'Make  me  an  American  Kegro.' '^  That  may 
seem  astonishing  for  any  one  to  say,  but  that 
eminent  man  said  it,  and  seemed  to  consider  it 
much  of  a  commonplace  in  the  saying.  A  great 
problem,  the  negro  is,  doubtless,  on  every  ac- 
count, but  plain  human  in  all  his  essential  needs, 
and  altogether  human  too  in  the  grand  possibili-  \ 
ties  of  his  future.  The  Afro -American ;  ten  \ 
millions  of  him. 

Mixed    Spanish    and    other  elemental  races.  \ 
Islands  full  of  them.     The  Philippines  so  far- 
distant  that  for  the  most  part  the  religious  work 

I 


118  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

is  carried  on  as  a  foreign  missionary  enterprise  ; 
and,  in  many  deplorable  ways,  our  federal  con- 
gress treats  the  Filipinos  as  foreigners.     Cuba, 
close  at  hand,  full  of  people  so  eager  to  become 
Americans  that  they  will  allow  no  government  of 
i  their  own  to  stand,  and  in  some  quarters  threaten 
deliberately  to  create  riot  if  self-government  is 
thrust  upon  them.     All  the  other  islands  of  recent 
acquisition  clamouring  for  American  things  and 
imitating  American  ways,  good  and  bad.     You 
and  I  know  what  makes  Americanism  really 
great.     Surely  these  newly-awakened,  inquiring 
people  should  not  be  permitted  to  remain  in 
doubt  as  to  what  those  ennobling  elements  are. 
"We  cannot  afford  to  offer  them  the  form  without 
I  the  substance.     The  islands  of  the  near  seas  and 
I  the  Isthmus  of  Panama,  full  of  people,  and  soon 
I  to  be  on  the  very  highway  of  the  world's  com- 
f  merce  and  international  enterprise. 

But  there  are  more  yet,  a  lot  more.     Immi- 
grants trooping  in  from  the  other  side  of  the 
ocean,  from  over  every  sea,  from  every  continent 
and  island  under  heaven  ;  trooping  in,  crowding 
in,  crushing  each  other  and  the  rest  of  us  in  their 
eager  stampede.     One  million  two  hundred  and 
1  eighty-five  thousand,  three  hundred  and  forty- 
I  nine  of  them  in  one  year's  time  j  more  than  a 
f  hundred  thousand  each  month,  and  stiU  coming. 
Eepresentatives  of  twenty-five  different  races, 
;  come  from  forty  different  countries.     Yesterday 
they  were  Italian,  Bohemian,  Bulgarian,  Croatian, 
Slovenian,    Dalmatian,    Euthenian,   Norwegian, 


"E  PLUEIBUS  UNUM'^  OF  GEACE    119 

Armenian,  Eoumanian,  East  Indian,  West  In- 
dian, Lithuanian,  Hertzogovinian,  Scandinavian, 
Eussiau,    Servian,    Syrian,    African,    Austrian, 
Polish,  Turkish,  Irish,  Finnish,  Flemish,  Eng- 
lish, Spanish,  Swedish,  Danish,  Chinese,  Portu- ' 
guese,     Japanese,     Polak,     Slovak,    Eussniak,  | 
French  and  German,  Dutch  and  Welsh,  Magyar 
and  Scotch,  Korean  and  Montenegrin,  Greek  and  : 
Hebrew.     To- day  they  are  Americans,  or  are  i 
trying  to  be.     They  have  heard  the  great  Amer-  J 
ican  eagle  screaming  out  his  ^  pluribus  unum,  | 
and  they  have  come  over  to  give  him  something  i 
really  to  scream  about.     They  have  all  come  after  , 
at  least  some  of  the  things  which  Americanism  is 
prepared  to  supply,  but  millions  of  them  have  ; 
the  meagerest  conception  of  the  best  thing  to  be  ; 
found.     It  would  be  wretchedly  bad  for  them  and 
for  all  the  rest  of  us  if  they  should  be  permitted 
to  return  whence  they  came  or  should  lie  down 
and  die  here,  never  having  learned  that  best 
thing  for  which  American   civilization  stands, 
and  which  has  endowed  it  with  its  greatness. 
People,  and  people,  and  more  people ;  millions 
of  them  ;  and  a  new  million  coming  each  twelve- 
month. 

But  that  is  not  all.  We  have  all  this  time 
been  skirting  the  boundaries,  toying  with  the 
fringes,  so  to  speak.  These  we  have  fallen  into 
the  habit  of  styling  the  exceptional  classes  of  our 
population.  There  is  now  the  rest,  exceptional 
only  in  being  exceptionally  important.  There  . 
are  those  millions  to  be  reckoned  in,  and  now  I 


120         MlSSiO:N^S  STEIKINC  HOME 

fifty  millions,  sixty  millions,  sixty-five  millions 
of  uncommon,  common  Americans,  sons  of  their 
fathers,  people  who  have  made  this  land  of  ours 
one  of  the  finest,  and  all  too  nearly  the  wickedest 
nation  upon  earth.  The  most  sordidly  contented, 
and  the  most  divinely  discontented  lot  of  people 
the  Lord  ever  got  together.  The  race  in  all  the 
history  of  the  world  the  most  capable  both  of 
virtue  and  of  vice,  and  not  too  backward,  at 
least  in  the  latter  particular,  about  revealing 
their  capabilities.  These  splendid,  wicked,  in- 
dustrious, careless,  godly,  godless,  Christian,  un- 
christian, uncommon,  common  American  people. 
God  bless  them  !  as  He  certainly  means  to  make 
of  them  a  blessing.  And  that  completes  the 
reckoning. 

Ah  !  that  completes  the  enumeration,  but  num- 
bers do  not  count  for  all  in  the  final  reckoning. 
There  are  some  eighty-five  or  ninety  millions  of 
them,  all  told,  but  that  is  far  from  telling  the 
full  tale.  The  problems  of  the  divine  purpose 
and  of  human  destiny  are  not  simple  sums  in 
arithmetic.  You  can  never  discover  what  God 
meant  in  creating  people  and  putting  them  here 
in  this  world,  merely  by  counting  people's  noses. 
The  Declaration  of  Independence  observes  that 
all  men  are  created  fp^e.  and  equal,  and  that  they 
are  endowed  indefeasibly  with  certain  common 
and  inalienable  rights,  which  is  all  true  enough, 
to  be  sure ;  but  it  does  not  say  that  all  men 
are  appointed  the  same  duties  in  the  universal 
economy  and  that  all  carry  the  same  responsi- 


"E  PLURIBUS  UNUM^^  OP  GRACE    121 

bilities.     We  often  remark  that  one  soul  is  as 
precious  in  God's  sight  as  another,  by  which  we 
mean  something  which  is  very  true,  and  which 
needs  much  to  be  emphasized.     But  that  is  not 
denying  that  certain  people  hold  positions  of 
peculiar  importance  in  the  enterprise  of  grace. 
The  American  has  no  business  strutting  about,  ^ 
boasting  that  he  is  better  than  other  people ;  for 
he  is  not,  and  his  strutting  goes  far  to  demon- 
strate that  he  is  not.     But  the  American  does  not  I 
know  his  place  in  the  divine  economy  and  in  the  \ 
issues  of  human  destiny  unless  he  understands 
that  he  carries  a  tremendous  load  of  responsi-  , 
bility  for  other  people  as  well  as  for  himself. 

It  is  not  enough,  therefore,  simply  to  remark 
that  here  are  eighty-five  or  ninety  millions  of 
people.  These  bulk  a  deal  larger  than  figures 
can  make  appear  when  it  is  reckoned  who  they 
are  and  what  God  expects  to  use  them  for.  Home 
missions  are  not  alone  missioning  at  home.  They 
are  by  the  very  necessities  of  the  situation  the 
most  effective  sort  of  world-wide  missions,  since 
they  are  getting  the  American  most  effectively 
ready  for  those  important  functions  for  which 
God  has  evidently  designed  him  among  the  peo- 
ples of  the  earth.  There  is  nothing  which  can 
mean  more  for  the  good  of  the  whole  world  and 
for  the  advancement  of  the  kingdom  of  God  in 
all  the  earth,  than  that  the  American  people 
should  be  downright,  upright,  inright,  outright  \ 
Christian,  and  so  prepared  for  the  Christly  mis-  | 
sion  for  which  God  is  ready  to  use  them. 


122         MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

E  pluribus  unum  is  stamped  upon  many  of  our 
coins  and  national  emblems.  It  is  wholesome 
that  we  remind  ourselves  that  the  American 
people  are  many  and  potent.  It  is  equally  im- 
portant to  observe  that  they  are  one  in  the 
economy  of  grace,  that  they  are  wrapped  in  the 
one  spiritual  bundle.  When  the  patriot  framers 
of  the  Declaration  of  Independence  arose  from 
the  table  at  which  they  had  signed  the  immortal 
document,  and,  as  the  consciousness  of  the  grave 
issues  of  the  moment  came  over  them,  one  of  the 
number  sententiously  remarked,  ^'Now,  we  must 
all  hang  together. ''  *^Yes,"  echoed  another, 
"for  if  we  do  not,  we  shall  hang  separately. '' 
It  required  nerve  to  be  jocular  on  such  an  occa- 
sion. The  little  quip  was  a  profound  truth.  It 
was  far  more  profound  than  the  flippant  speaker 
could  have  realized,  serious  as  was  the  situation 
for  those  hardy  patriots.  It  was  the  immediate 
application  of  a  principle  which  operates  through 
all  society  and  is  especially  applicable  to  the 
national  life  to  which  those  daring  men  were  that 
moment  giving  birth,  the  American  common- 
wealth. We  go  up  and  down  together  ;  the  peo- 
ple of  any  social  order  do,  more  or  less  truly. 
We  American  people  do  by  virtue  of  the  peculiar 
sensitiveness  of  our  national  and  social  organism. 
When  we  fall  to  teetering,  part  of  us  soaring 
high,  and  part  of  us  dropping  deep,  the  very 
foundation  of  things  in  the  centre  begins  to 
totter.  Two  generations  of  orators  and  states- 
men have  lauded  the  sagacity  of  Abraham  Lin- 


"E  PLUEIBUS  UNUM"  OF  GRACE    123 

coin  who  dared  in  a  critical  moment  to  declare, 
^'This  Republic  cannot  endure  half  slave,  half 
free."  At  the  time  and  in  its  immediate  appli- 
cation, it  was  a  daring  thing  to  say.  Of  course 
it  is  true ;  the  underlying  truth  is  far  more  pro- 
found than  Lincoln's  application  of  it  suggested. 
A  nation  like  ours  cannot  endure  half  of  much  of 
anything.  We  cannot  remain  long  balanced  on 
the  thin  edge  of  any  moral  or  spiritual  reality. 
Make  the  best  of  a  condition  of  unstable  equilib- 
rium, the  instability  is  a  hazard. 

The  spiritualities  are  peculiarly  sensitive  to 
the  laws  of  gravitation.  Water  does  not  begin 
to  seek  its  lowest  level  with  the  promptness  with 
which  humanity  responds  to  a  similar  law  in 
the  spiritual  realm.  We  move  in  the  mass,  we 
Americans  do.  We  do,  simply  because  we  are 
people,  and  more  especially  because  we  are  Amer- 
icans. We  do  whether  we  altogether  want  to  or 
not.  We  do,  in  the  last  analysis,  because  we 
have  to,  because  the  free  operation  of  the  spirit- 
uals demands  that  we  shall. 

It  may  be  diificult  for  some  to  discern  the  con- 
nection between  the  morally  and  spiritually  neg- 
lected communities  in  the  distance,  and  the  fair- 
featured  youngsters  who  play  upon  our  door- 
steps, but  the  connection  is  established,  and  all 
the  remoteness  of  the  parties  involved  and  the 
disparities  of  station  and  temper,  cannot  wholly 
destroy  the  connection's  vitality.  The  very  fluc- 
tuations and  volatility  of  our  modern  life  are  ren- 
dering   more    vital    our   spiritual    unity.     We 


124  MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

Americans  are  astonishingly  agile  travellers.  It 
is  idle  to  look  twice  in  the  same  spot  for  any  of 
us.  Some  reckon  this  trait  our  national  glory. 
It  makes,  it  may  readily  appear,  for  our  national 
health.  But  it  is  easy  to  understand  also  that  it 
is  bound  to  spread  disease,  if  there  is  any.  The 
doctors  have  pretty  well  established  the  germ 
theory  for  medical  practice.  Every  disease  is 
more  or  less  transmissible.  Not  contagious,  may 
be,  in  the  old  sense  of  the  word,  but  far  more 
contagious,  in  the  real  sense,  than  the  old  prac- 
titioners ever  imagined.  The  most  virulent 
maladies  are  often  contracted  from  the  slightest 
touch,  from  a  gust  of  wind  as  one  hastens  past  an 
infected  spot,  from  a  chance  brush  of  the  cloth- 
ing in  the  jostle  of  the  street.  These  are  purely 
physical  transactions,  chemical  precipitations. 
The  spirituals  are  far  more  delicate  and  sensitive 
still.  None  can  estimate  the  potency  of  these  in- 
timate and  delicate  spiritual  contacts. 

And  the  points  of  such  contact  are  multiplying 
at  a  marvellous  rate.  The  country  people  are 
crowding  in  to  the  cities,  and  all  the  capitalists. 
East  and  West,  cannot  build  electric  railroads 
fast  enough  to  carry  the  city  people  out  to  the 
country.  Westerners  are  flocking  East,  and  wise 
old  Horace  Greeleys  are  still  charging  the  rising 
generation,  ^^Go  West,  young  man.'^  The  par- 
ticular phraseology  of  the  advice  is  now  being 
modified,  and  they  are  saying  much  of  the  time, 
^*Go  South,  young  man  j  go  South. '^  But  the 
variation  only  introduces  a  new  complication. 


<^E  PLUEIBUS  UNUM"  OF  GEACE    125 

The  lust  of  gold  on  the  Yukon  precipitates  a 
stampede  of  people  to  Alaska,  and  the  same  lust 
of  gold  on  Wall  Street  draws  in  men  to  that 
maelstrom  like  grains  of  wheat  into  the  hopper  of 
a  grist  mill.  Passions,  ambitions,  friendships, 
animosities,  all  unite  to  keep  us  perpetually  on 
the  move. 

There  is  no  community  so  staid  and  confirmed 
in  its  ways  as  not  to  feel  the  movement  of  the 
currents.  Even  those  to  whom  the  same  spot  is 
home  from  birth  to  death,  are  really  no  more  ex- 
empt than  the  rest  from  the  contagion  of  the 
spirituals.  Wherever  any  of  us  may  live,  we  are 
reading  pretty  much  the  same  books  and  papers. 
We  are  sharing  each  other's  ideas  as  fluently  as 
if  each  were  equipped  with  a  Marconigraphic 
apparatus  j  and  ideas  are  the  very  health  or  dis- 
ease of  the  soul.  People  in  different  sections 
speak  with  varying  accents,  but  they  are  all  say- 
ing much  the  same  things.  Even  our  slang  has 
now  become  universalized.  There  are  two  great 
slang  factories :  the  Bowery,  and  the  wilds  of 
Arizona  ;  and  the  entire  country  is  kept  con- 
stantly supplied  with  the  latest  output  of  both. 
Each  newspaper  East  and  West  rehashes  the  de- 
tails now  of  the  shocking  murder  scene  and  the 
more  revolting  social  debauch  in  the  Madison 
Square  Garden,  and  again  of  the  life  story  of  that 
prodigy  of  crime  on  the  witness  chair  in  Idaho. 
Months  and  months  ago  an  event  transpired  in 
San  Francisco  which  stirred  the  nation  to  the  re- 
motest bounds  of  its  life.    Of  course  there  were 


126         MISSIONS  STEIKING  HOME 

the  earthquake  and  fire,  but  I  have  nothing  so 

,     tame  as  that  in  mind.     It  was  this  :  a  school- 

j     teacher  one  day  told  two  or  three  or  half  a  dozen 

I     brown-skinned  children  that  they  should  go  home 

\    or  to  another  school,  and  to  this  very  day  sober 

\    editors  the  country  over,  and  some  not  so  sober, 

1    are  sagely  discussing  the  grave  national  and  in- 

'   ternational  issues  which  are  likely  to  ensue  if  we 

don' t  watch  out. 

It  is  always  making  a  difference  to  all  of  us 
how  things  are  going  anywhere  and  everywhere. 
It  must  appear  therefore  that  the  neglect  of  the 
spiritual  needs  of  any  section  or  race  or  rank  of 
our  people  is  unreasonable  and  foolish  and  men- 
aceful  and  suicidal  and  all  that.     It  is  more  ;  it  is 
impossible.     The  neglected  simply  will  not  stay 
neglected.    You  know  how  it  is  with  a  child. 
Spoiled,  he  is  not  content  with  being  spoiled  ;  he 
becomes  a  spoiler.     This  is  a  case  one  with  the 
doctors'  disease  germs :  they  grow  and  multiply 
faster  than  one  can  count.     Bad  conditions  do 
not  merely  remain  conditions  :  they  turn  at  once 
into  forces. 
But  that  is  not  all,  or  the  most  important  thing 
{  to  be  said.     The  chances  are  that  you  and  I  will 
j  never  be  scared  into  doing  our  duty  by  the  spir- 
itually neglected.     If  we  wait  to  minister  cleans- 
-:    ing  to  the  unclean  till  after  we  are  forced  into  it 
I    by  the  jeopardy  of  ourselves  becoming  befouled, 
I   that  ministry,  I  fear,  will  be  shamefully  delayed. 
I    Let  us  not  preach  the  gospel  for  the  menace  of 
I    not  doing  so.    Let  us  rather  share  with  God  His 


<<E  PLUEIBUS  UNUM^^  OF  GEACE    127 

glorious  enterprise.  It  is  a  great  task  you  and  I 
and  God  have  assumed.  It  would  not  be  worthy 
of  us  if  it  were  not  so.  Perhaps  you  and  I  seem 
to  be  carrying  a  very  small  end  of  the  load,  and 
perhaps — shame  on  us  ! — it  is  true  that  we  are. 
But  if  we  are,  it  is  a  gratuity  on  our  part.  It  is 
not  God's  way  to  emphasize  our  insignificance. 
The  very  point  of  remark  is  that  this  of  which  we 
are  a  part  is  a  great,  closely  articulated  organisin, 
and  the  articulation  is  growing  more  complete 
every  day.  No  part  of  an  organism  is  wholly  in- 
significant ;  it  could  not  be  so,  even  if  it  should 
try.  No  healthy  American  entertains  a  doubt  of 
the  destiny  in  the  world  economy  marked  by  God 
for  the  American  people.  The  very  counsels  of 
the  Almighty  are  bound  up  in  the  issue  of  having 
the  American  people  ready  to  do  their  part.  You 
and  I  know  what  each  American,  white,  black, 
brown,  red,  yellow,  fair  or  swarthy,  needs  most : 
the  illuminating,  uplifting,  steadying,  soul-re- 
deeming power  of  Jesus  Christ,  the  Saviour  of 
men's  lives.  He  needs  it  not  alone  for  himself, 
but  for  all  the  rest  and  for  all  the  world,  since 
he  holds  in  his  power  the  shaping  of  so  much  of 
human  destiny.  Home  missions  offer  a  pro- 
gramme for  the  patriot,  the  Christian,  the  man 
or  the  woman  who  has  sounded  the  purposes  of 
God  for  His  world  through  the  ages. 


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